


Stars, Hide Your Fires

by Ophidias (Audair)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 1950s, Angst, Bookstores, Borgin and Burkes (Harry Potter), Don't copy to another site, Drama, Horcruxes, Knockturn Alley, M/M, Magical Artifacts, Master of Death Harry Potter, Mind Games, Obsession, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Hogwarts, Powerful Harry, Romance, Slow Build, Slow Burn, The Deathly Hallows, Time Travel, Tom Riddle is His Own Warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27745546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Audair/pseuds/Ophidias
Summary: Riddle’s undivided attention snapped to him with the swiftness of shattering glass. His turbulent magic receded from where it had besieged the shop."You,” he breathed.Coiling in leisurely motions, the eager tendrils of his magic reached for Harry, swathing about his limbs and neck and chest with a liquid, flowing fascination."I’ve been looking for you,” Riddle continued, tilting his head to the side and sweeping his gaze over Harry. It was an appraisal that felt simultaneously like the raking of iron nails and the tender drapery of silk.It was so familiar, and yet… so foreign.In the winding streets of Knockturn Alley, an intricate dance of mutual obsession unravels between twenty-three-year-old Tom Riddle and a time-travelling Harry Potter.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Tom Riddle, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 246
Kudos: 1395
Collections: Lady Bibliophile's Collection of Incredible Fanfiction





	1. Tortuous

“What do you think would happen,” Harry wondered aloud over breakfast, “if I quit the aurors?”

Ginny dropped the toast she had been reaching for, and shot him a sharp look across the table. “You’ve barely even started working for the aurors, Harry. How could you possibly want to quit already?”

Harry’s hands were fidgety, playing with his eggs, shifting them around in the greasy plate. Back and forth, back and forth. The motion was soothing, hypnotic.

He flickered his gaze to where Ginny waited, patiently, her brown eyes kind and warm and understanding. He swallowed. “I just… I don’t feel like I’m making a difference. Not really.”

“Hmm.” Ginny raised the piece of toast to her mouth again, chewing as she mulled her response. “It’s… it’s unexpected, definitely. Have you talked to Ron and Hermione?”

But Harry didn’t want to talk to Ron and Hermione.

He shook his head and looked back at his half-eaten breakfast – not an unusual sight. “Forget I said anything.”

“It’s been three assignments,” Ginny went on, as he picked up his plate and walked to the sink. “Maybe you’re just having trouble settling – you could talk to Robards, or something. Take it easy for a while, or take on assignments you feel better suited for.”

“Maybe.” Harry shrugged noncommittally. A pounding headache was beginning to assault him, emanating from the base of his skull and burrowing into his temples. He slid up his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose, and drew in a breath through gritted teeth.

Maybe he should look into getting contacts. Hermione had been suggesting it for the past several months.

The kitchen window above him was pelted with incessant, pounding rain. As he ran the dish under water, watching the soapy suds wash away, Harry thought back to his last meeting with his two closest friends.

It had been a weekend dinner at the Burrow, golden and bright and beautiful. Mrs Weasley had plied them with hot meals, and Ron had grinned, uninhibited, about his and Harry’s recent graduation from the Auror Academy.

They had been partnered together, and Hermione had gushed about the fact almost as much as Ron did, even as she shared enthusiastic snippets of her own internship in the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures. The night had been drenched with noise and radio music and the scent of firewhiskey and butterbeer– everything that made the Burrow, in so many ways, a home to Harry.

And Harry had spent most of it out on the back porch, gazing at the sun as it sunk below the horizon. The breeze had stirred the blades of grass, and dragonflies had darted about at the edge of his vision. Blurry, unclear, peripheral.

No, he didn’t think he wanted to talk to Ron and Hermione about it. He didn’t think he could.

“Will you be coming over for breakfast tomorrow?” Harry asked as Ginny joined him by the sink.

“Maybe.” Ginny leaned against the countertop, arms folded. Her brow furrowed as she stared intently at him. “You doing all right, Harry?”

Harry spoke without missing a beat. “Yeah, of course. I’m fine.”

He didn’t look up from the frothing water in the sink, from the yellow dish rag with which he wiped each utensil dry. “I’m fine,” he repeated, because Ginny had yet to leave, to take a pinch of the Floo powder above the mantelpiece and vanish back to the Burrow.

Ginny’s Quidditch training didn’t begin until late morning. But she still came by Grimmauld Place sometimes, sharing breakfast or tea with Harry, even though they were no longer together.

Harry sighed. “I’ll have to head to work soon.”

Ginny nodded, but neither of them moved from where they stood, the patter of rain a constant buzz in the heavy silence. Harry savoured the sound and the distraction it offered.

For some reason, it made it easier for him to twist his lips into a carefree laugh and say, “Not that I don’t want you here, Gin, but I think it would be best for everyone if you left before Kreacher realizes I have a guest over.”

And just like that, Ginny’s eyes sparkled jovially again. She flipped back a lock of her fiery hair. “What, and preparing your own breakfast is allowed?”

“No, but I’m good at hiding evidence of that.”

Harry didn’t allow his grin to diminish even as Ginny bid him goodbye. Her words were riddled with invites to come visit the Burrow; her mum missed him, and they should all get together one night for drinks, him and Ron and Hermione and all the Gryffindors and Luna, too, of course–

“I’ll think about it,” Harry called after her. He watched as Ginny was swallowed by a wall of roaring emerald flames.

She left behind an oppressive silence, interrupted by the muffled battering of London’s frigid downpour.

* * *

Harry saw the candle flame before the candle flame saw him.

“…and I have a licence for all the products in my shop, as you aurors well know,” Borgin was saying. The man stood haughtily off to one side and pretended not to watch, as Ron rifled through the numerous scrolls strewn over his countertop. “No illegal artefacts here, our reputation has been untarnished since the end of the war–”

Ron snorted at that, before clearing his throat to disguise the sound. “Your records seem to be in order, I suppose,” he said with remarkable poise, though he must have been internally groaning at the sight of the egregious paperwork. “Lead the way to storage, then, Mr Borgin.”

Harry blinked as the windows came back into focus, streaked with endless droplets of rain. In spite of the many spheres of light dotting the shelves and the walls, the interior of the shop was bathed in dimness.

Harry could feel a roiling revulsion rising in him with every minute he spent in the shop. From Borgin’s twitchy hands, indubitably wishing to grab hold of his wand, to Ron’s obvious pride, shining through his puffed-up chest and tall posture – Harry wanted nothing more than to simply walk out of Knockturn Alley, out of Britain, if possible.

And every time the thought crossed his mind, the cold arms of guilt wrapped around him instantly afterwards.

His friends were so happy, and the wizarding world was rebuilding itself… and here Harry was, the ugly ghost of envy and despair possessing him in everyone’s sunniest moments.

Harry didn’t even know when it had begun to consume him, this pervasive need to destroy what had been seventeen years in the making. It had crept up on him, like a steady rivulet, and infused itself into his bloodstream, an insidious poison.

It was there, in the grime and dust accumulated upon the decades worth of dark artefacts, that his eyes fell upon firelight. Upon the singular, midnight-blue candle flame.

It was entrancing. Quivering in time to the raindrops, mesmeric as it drew his eye from the shadows of a corner shelf.

Harry didn’t know what to think as he gazed at the flame. Only that it felt much like the Imperius curse, seductively whispering in his ear.

An allure, sinking its hooks into his very soul.

“Harry, you’ll catalogue the stuff out here?”

With an effort akin to rousing himself from millennia of sleep, Harry snapped his focus to Ron. “Yeah. I’ll join you once I’m done.”

“Don’t suppose I need to warn you not to touch anything.” Borgin’s voice was sour. His beady eyes glimmered through the gloom like a bad omen. “I won’t be responsible for any accidents.”

Harry released a slow exhale, and turned away from the pair as they disappeared through a back door. The process of scanning the assorted products was slow. His eyes skimmed over the artefacts lining the shelves and spilling out onto the floor of Borgin and Burkes.

 _Don’t touch anything_ – easier said than done.

Regardless, he kept his hands in his pockets, fingertips brushing against his wand.

The Hand of Glory stood where it had in his second year, but the Vanishing Cabinet was gone. A host of unfamiliar artefacts had appeared in the years between his last visit to this particular nook of Knockturn Alley. A house of tarot cards, a row of statuettes with faces grotesquely twisted, an innocuous looking music box…

…and that candle flame, warping over itself the moment Harry’s eyes fell upon it.

It flickered. And for a brief moment, it reminded Harry of an eye fluttering slowly open. As though the flame itself was a beast, waking itself to its first glimpse of the world. Of Borgin and Burkes. Of Harry.

It was purposeful, withdrawn… and aware.

The world teetered, like a photograph blurring at the edges. Harry forced himself to fasten his scrutiny to the statuettes close to him. Memorizing their distorted, horrified features, before moving on to a vial of what looked like runespoor venom.

Squeezing his eyes shut, he swallowed back a curse.

He didn’t need this. This stench of dark magic saturating his senses, the vibrating hum of artefacts eager for unsuspecting victims. Another pang, another urge to simply depart, clenched around him like a vice.

But he couldn’t leave Ron.

His heart thudded painfully in his chest, fingers trembling as he closed them around the handle of his holly wand, seeking comfort in the familiar grooves, the warmth of the phoenix feather core. Almost against his will, his gaze strayed to the blue, almost black glow in the corner.

Concealed, shrouded, the flame burned brighter the moment his wayward awareness drifted close.

And Harry felt the undeniable, hair-raising sensation of being _seen_.

He took an unconscious step back, fingers tightening around his wand, a chill seeping into his skin. He was about to ask Borgin about the candle, but when he turned, the front of the shop was empty, and the door behind the counter firmly shut.

Harry willed his feet to move, his hands to grasp the brass doorknob and seek out Ron, to _snap out of it_. And when he was on the brink of succeeding – as if sensing his inner turmoil–

The flame shrunk in on itself, and _leaped_.

It soared through the cramped interior, a plume of dragon’s breath. Writhing resolutely in his direction, the flame struck.

But Harry was already springing away, muscles drawn taut and eyes bright with fervour.

He came up short against another shelf and spun to face his inanimate attacker.

A candle flame, he could have extinguished between his thumb and forefinger. But the monstrosity before him was a raging bonfire, a hissing beast. Harry felt his eyes widen behind his glasses as the shop’s interior lit up in a flare of cobalt blue, sharpening the edges of each shelf, each shadow.

Spells and counter-curses swelled upon the tip of his tongue. Somehow, he didn’t think an _aguamenti_ could take care of this.

The flame rolled in mid-air, and twisted in pursuit.

Harry raised his wand instinctively. Ignoring the sudden chill descending upon the shop, he stumbled away from the blaze, until his back collided with a shelf.

Amidst the clatter of falling objects, his movements stuttered. For a wild moment, he was transported back to the Lestrange vault, and every falling jewel and artefact multiplied around him… searing into his skin, entombing him in the tunnels of Gringotts for eternity…

A burst of adrenaline flooded his veins. A thick shield rippled into place before his crouching form – just as the coiling flames reached him.

The flames collided against the _P_ _rotego_ charm, billowing against its surface. Like a surreal sheet of rippling blue, they fizzed and crackled inches from Harry’s face, blinding in their radiance.

They seemed to press down upon the shield for a boundless moment.

And Harry’s mind flashed, irrationally, to the lightbulb flare of cameras. Capturing photographs of his dazed visage, entrapping memories of his existence.

In the next second, the flames receded, as unpredictably as they had ballooned.

Harry gaped in the direction of the innocently lambent candle. His skin was cold – and wasn’t that odd? To stand so close to a searing inferno and be left frozen in its wake.

The flames had been cold. Algid as the fingers of corpses.

Somehow, it was this thought which wormed its way into his bones, and almost overwhelmed him with the urge to escape.

The drumming of rain was a monotone in his ears. The thud of hasty footsteps interrupted the roiling beat of his heart.

He straightened himself from his half-crouch just as the door behind the counter banged open, and Ron rushed in with his wand half-raised.

“Harry!” Ron exclaimed, sweeping his gaze over the tumbled objects, the disturbed layer of dust on the floor from where Harry’s body had shoved against the shelf, to Harry himself, who stood with one shaking hand in his pocket and the other clenched tightly around his holly wand.

“Everything’s fine.” Harry’s eyes darted to the candle in the corner. “One of the artefacts was just… acting up. It’s under control.”

Ron was abruptly shoved to the side as Borgin stumbled into the shop after him, making a beeline towards the muddle of artefacts fallen to the floor.

“Who’s going to clean this up?” he spat out, his teeth bared, glare shifting between Ron and Harry before firmly settling on the latter. “Which artefact did you touch?”

“I didn’t touch it.” Harry’s voice was flat. “It was that candle in the corner.”

Borgin frowned, swivelling back to note the object in the corner. “Ah. That… that’s a fairly new acquisition.”

“What does it do?” Ron butted in, raising his brow at Harry in a silent question.

Harry shook his head, just as Borgin responded acrimoniously, “Why don’t you ask your _partner_? If my records have been examined, I would demand you two leave at once.” He sniffed. “You are no longer welcome here.”

Ron bristled, but Harry pressed a hand to his bicep and pushed him in the direction of the front door. “We’ll leave,” Harry said, “and I’m sorry, for… potentially damaging your goods. We were nearly done anyway.”

He wasn’t, but he couldn’t stand it for a second longer – this tenebrous, confining shop, riddled with traps and malice and the weight of memories.

Borgin didn’t acknowledge his apology, nor their departure, as the glass door swung shut firmly behind Harry and Ron. Lifting a wand to cast twin _Impervius_ charms on their auror robes, Harry guided Ron from under the awning to the inundated roads of Knockturn Alley, hurrying towards the livelier shopfronts of Diagon.

“Harry,” Ron began, yelling to be heard over the rain, “mind telling me what that was all about?”

The inclement weather cut through Harry's spells and the fabric of clothes to pierce every inch of his bones. He seized Ron's wrist and pulled him in the direction of the apparition points. “I’ll tell you once we’re back at the Ministry.”

Ensconced in the familiar warmth of their shared office, hands curled around a mug of steaming, watery coffee, Harry spilled, in vivid detail, the description of the candle flame, its peculiar attack, its magnetism to Ron. Even to his own ears, his voice was detached, his words choppy and concise, because Ron was treating it as a debrief – scribbling the particulars down on a parchment with a single-minded focus he had been loath to practise at Hogwarts.

“We should probably go back,” Ron mused, biting the tip of his quill. “Or talk to Robards about sending someone to check it out. We didn’t even get to complete our inspection.”

Harry sighed as he sank back into his chair, eyes half-lidded. He listlessly scanned the items on his desk. Parchment, quills, wand holster, nameplate.

Unlike Ron, he had no photo frames to adorn the edge of his workspace.

“It doesn’t make a difference,” Harry deadpanned. “If Borgin has a licence for it, he’ll get to keep it.”

Ron glanced up from his rough report, frowning. “That’s not true. I’m sure if it’s deemed risky enough–”

“Then he’ll pay someone off to sweep it under the rug. Meanwhile, some poor sod selling harmless herbs or basilisk scales will be arrested, because they didn’t have the right papers or the right number of galleons. I know how it works, Ron.”

“When did you get so cynical?”

Ron’s words were spoken slowly, laced with caution. Harry tried to avoid his gaze, but Ron merely tilted his head to the side, watching him with narrowed eyes. “Have you been skipping meals again, Harry? You know how Mum gets about that, and Hermione too–”

“I haven’t,” Harry interrupted. “Skipping meals, that is.”

Which was technically true. Eating less than usual wasn’t equivalent to skipping meals, after all.

Ron’s response was a contemplative hum, and when Harry chanced a glance at his best friend, his mouth was concealed behind a closed fist.

Oh, no. Harry knew that look.

“I’m busy tonight –” Harry started, but Ron quelled him with a sceptical look.

“Really? Doing what?”

“…Negotiating chores with Kreacher.”

Ron’s features softened as a fond grin split his face. “Harry, just for tonight. Hermione and I would love to have you over – it’s been a while, and she’s been dying to talk to you about her new job…”

Harry bit his lip, tapping a finger against the edge of his cup. He could feel Ron wearing down his defences, and he was tempted to simply lay his forehead against his desk and let the world slip away into oblivion. “I don’t know… I’m tired today, what with the whole cursed candle attack–”

“And you could tell Hermione about that!” Ron suggested, eyes brightening as though it was the perfect possible scenario. “She would have a ton of theories – you could discuss it over dinner.” He sucked in a sharp breath, before imploring Harry with wide, guileless blue eyes. “Please?”

A soft laugh escaped Harry’s lips. He tipped his head to the side, where the water-streaked window was painted with the blush of sunset. “All right. Fine. You go on ahead, and I’ll… I’ll finalize the report and join you in an hour.”

Ron followed his gaze and frowned at the falling dusk. “I didn’t realize it was so late. You don’t have to stay alone; I could wait with you–”

“No.” Harry’s voice brooked no argument, but his pulse fluttered anxiously at the idea of batting down another protest. He shook his head firmly when Ron opened his mouth. “No, just… give me an hour. I’ll be there.”

Ron’s mouth closed with a twist, but thankfully, he sighed and nodded. “Don’t work too long,” he reminded Harry, plucking his cloak from the back of his chair and sweeping it over his shoulders. “Or I’ll come drag you back.”

Harry laughed, spreading his arms wide. “Me, work too long? Never!”

With a roll of his eyes, Ron swung the door shut behind him. It clicked into place with a dull echo.

* * *

The Ministry atrium was deserted when Harry finally crossed it to the gilded fireplaces, sometime close to quarter past seven.

He was quite proud of himself – this wasn’t even remotely late. The first pinpricks of stars had been glimmering through his charmed window when he dropped the finished report in his outbox, watching it vanish with a resounding pop.

Even though the atrium was underground, Harry could imagine the navy and cobalt shades which would be tinging the world now – cool and fragrant after the autumn showers. It was a pity he didn’t have time to walk part of the way to Ron and Hermione’s apartment.

Harry slowed his stride to an amble as he reached the row of fireplaces. A shudder threatened to seize hold of his body as he stepped through the grate.

The Ministry was inexplicably chilly. Arctic, almost, as though plagued by the coming of dementors.

Harry shifted on his feet, releasing a fistful of Floo powder, repeating his destination in his mind. He would be out of here soon. Any moment now, the Floo would light up, acid-green, and carry him spinning to the creams and beiges of his friends’ home.

But the reassurance did little to warm the icy tips of his fingers. He curled one hand over the handle of his wand and raised the other to the warmth of his exhales.

The world froze in the same breath as the Floo flared to life. In that fleeting moment, before the curse from Borgin and Burkes ensnared Harry in the fireplaces of the Ministry of Magic, he thought of Ron’s desk in their shared office. Cluttered with photographs of Ron, of Hermione, of Harry.

Familiar, brilliant blue bled into his vision.

Cold as a corpse’s fingers, the flames rose to engulf him.

* * *

Every fibre of his being was on fire. His breath and magic and drops of his soul mingling in a chaotic ballad. _Music._

Music, rising to a crescendo, as frozen fire ripped him apart.

It lasted but a nano-second, yet that melody imprinted itself into the very marrow of his bones.

If fire were a song, a song which struck at all five of the senses and more, Harry would imagine it to be somewhat like this.

A lament intertwining with the beat of war drums.

A lullaby and a thunderous pounding…

…the taste of ash on his tongue…

…before his entire body was enveloped in a warmth so all-consuming, it wiped every atom of him out of existence.

Abruptly, Harry was spat out of a fireplace.

Falling to the floor in an inelegant heap, Harry winced as the stems of his glasses dug into the sides of his face – his face, which felt as though it was simply coated in grime and filth and the unfortunately familiar sensation of soot.

Harry opened his mouth to draw a breath, then broke into a fit of coughing, a cloud of black rising in front of him as he did. He blinked, but it was useless, for his glasses were as plastered with soot and ash as the rest of him, and his sleeves would serve no purpose in helping clean them.

“What the fuck,” Harry whispered in a scratchy voice. He felt twelve years old again, on his back, lenses cracked and obscured, having spun through the Floo network of London before being violently expelled onto the floor of Borgin and Burkes.

Harry’s lips twisted at the unpleasant reminder of the shop which had started this whole thing–

_Midnight blue flames, leaping at him and writhing to catch him in mid-air–_

–before he reminded himself that he was not, in fact, twelve and helpless anymore, but twenty and a fully-trained auror. No matter how unwilling.

Pushing himself onto his elbows, Harry slipped his wand into his hand and pointed it blindly at his glasses before muttering, “ _Scourgify_!”

His glasses wiped themselves spotlessly clean, though one of the lenses did turn out to be cracked, after all. A quick _reparo_ fixed that, before another _scourgify_ took care of his clothes, and Harry was just pulling himself into a standing position when the door behind the counter opened and a tall figure stepped out.

“I apologize if I kept you waiting.”

The words were spoken in a low, dulcet tenor, carefully devised to beguile and charm.

“But I am afraid your entry into the shop was rather soundless.”

A pleasant smile was shot his way, but Harry no longer had any breath left in his lungs. Nor any thoughts in his brain fit for formulating a response.

“It is somewhat impressive,” Tom Riddle continued, unruffled in the face of Harry’s gawkiness. “There is a bell right above the shop door; you must be skilled to have evaded it so exceptionally.” He laughed at his own transparent attempt at flattery, before his expression seemed to dim and he tilted his head, a furrow taking shape between his perfectly groomed brows. “Are you all right? You appear quite shaken.”

Harry blinked, and it felt as though reality had snapped into place, as though the world had jarred itself out of its breathless pause and gradually continued its ordinary, spinning motions.

“I – I’m fine,” he stammered, instincts kicking in as he appraised his surroundings, inquisitive gaze darting and scanning and focusing rapidly. “Is this Borgin and Burkes?”

“Naturally,” Riddle drawled with a tinge of amusement, “considering there is a sign outside the shop, and it is painted on the windowfront–”

He must have decided Harry was not worth the effort of his sweet talk – not rich enough or pureblood enough or powerful enough – and Harry snapped, “Yes, but I didn’t enter through the front door. So, really, bold of you to assume I saw them.”

Riddle raised an enquiring brow, even as something like confusion entered his dark eyes. Harry thought the hue suited him better than crimson, but before he could absent-mindedly comment on it, the expression cleared, shuttered behind a mask of blankness.

“You… didn’t enter through the front door? It’s not possible to enter by any other means,” Riddle said, by way of explanation, before looking at him expectantly.

Harry’s wandering stare, meanwhile, had riveted itself to the corner where the candle flame had stood that morning.

It was empty now. Just another dark corner in a shady little shop, next to what looked like a Sneakoscope made of teal glass.

Useless.

“I came through the Floo,” Harry answered, as his eyes continued to rove over this room infested with Dark artefacts.

Something was strange, dissonantly surreal…

But he couldn’t quite put his finger on what, not with the glaringly obvious error that was _Tom Riddle_ in front of him.

 _I’m dreaming_ , he thought shakily. _I’ve finally lost it, and I’m hallucinating._

“You couldn’t have come through the Floo,” Riddle explained, voice brimming with patience, even as Harry caught a minute twitch in his jaw. “The Floo is accessible only to select customers and business associates.”

 _Or,_ a cruel voice murmured in his mind, _you’re dead, and this is the afterlife. Trapped in a claustrophobic shop with your mortal enemy as he gives you his customer service treatment. Meet Tom Riddle, retail worker at Borgin and Burke’s._

Harry consciously dammed up his leaking hysteria, finally concluding his cursory inspection of this crooked version of Borgin and Burkes. “It was an accident.”

His clarification sounded hollow to his own ears. He was sure it was because the jagged pieces he had been grasping at had, at last, fallen into place.

It was like constructing an eerie _spot-the-difference_ game in his frantic, feverish mind.

The arrangement of the shelves, a touch unfamiliar – just as outwardly disorganized, yet incongruous in a way that was obvious in hindsight. Borgin could have rearranged the shelves since his visit, sure, but the layer of dust above the artefacts lay undisturbed–

And it was the dust which made Harry aware of the second discrepancy.

Swirls of dust motes danced in the shafts of sunlight filtering through the windowfront. Brilliant, summer sunlight, at the peak of morning, touching noon – instead of dying rays of it, filtering feebly through the clouds at seven in the evening.

And the artefacts in the shop–

Harry swallowed as he glimpsed them once more.

Gone was the house of tarot cards, the row of monstrous statuettes. The Hand of Glory still sat on a velvet cushion, omnipresent and proud, but the cursed opal necklace was back…

…as was the mocking structure of the Vanishing Cabinet.

Bellatrix Lestrange’s screeching laughs were echoing in his ears as Harry turned back to Riddle, and with an effort dragged himself into the present. It felt as though he had risen from the depths of the ocean, leaving his stomach somewhere behind.

“…even listening to me? I asked what sort of accident would allow you to break into a private Floo network.” Riddle’s eyes were bright with peevishness when Harry finally blinked at him. “You’re absolutely certain you don’t need me to contact someone for you? St Mungo’s, perhaps?”

Harry felt his hackles rising, and bared his teeth almost on instinct. He would have punched this man–

Except this version of Voldemort still had his nose, and Harry would rather not mar it before its time.

That would be a rather significant change. Hermione’s chiding face floated up in his mind’s eye, her words a familiar echo.

_Bad things happen to wizards who mess with time, Harry._

Hermione would be so disappointed in him.

Harry closed his eyes, pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, and focused on counting backwards from ten.

“I said I’m fine, Riddle. I ended up here because I–” He paused for a moment to relish the fact that his bizarre life was about to supply him with the perfect excuse for this scenario “–I mispronounced Diagon Alley. I hadn’t cleaned the Floo and all this ash and soot got into my throat so I couldn’t speak properly–”

“Then you should not have spoken at all,” Riddle interrupted, poorly concealed mirth livening the lines of his face. “Have you never used the Floo before?”

He found this quite entertaining, didn’t he?

Harry wanted to scowl.

“Something like that,” he said instead, his cheeks warm.

He was unwilling to indulge Riddle any further. He glanced nervously at the door to the shop, lined with golden, buttery _sunlight_ , and his heart was beating somewhere in his throat…

He was about to rush out with no explanation – who cared what _Tom Riddle_ , of all people, thought of him – but Riddle caught his attention by querying, in a disbelieving voice, “Are you an auror?”

Harry started. Riddle’s gaze was pinned to him with an unwavering intensity. Pinned, specifically, to where his cloak had fallen open, offering the slimmest peek to the robes Harry wore underneath – which consisted, of course, of his auror uniform.

“No,” Harry lied, stepping back and shifting so he was fully concealed once more. He ignored Riddle’s stare, where incredulity had only deepened, and said instead, “I’d better–”

His words died on the tip of his tongue.

Riddle had shifted his posture, leaning back against the countertop and folding his arms across his chest. And as his fingers curled around his elbow, shafts of sunshine struck them at a seamless angle and–

Harry felt his eyes widening, imperceptibly, as the Gaunt ring – the Resurrection Stone – caught the light, glinting disdainfully at him.

His breath hitched. The world seemed to halt once more, as it had been doing frequently around Harry since about fifteen minutes ago.

He couldn’t possibly – he couldn’t leave this in Riddle’s care any longer.

_A horcrux._

_A Hallow._

Hermione’s voice barrelled into his mind, young as it had been back in third year, when she had held a spinning time-turner between ink-stained fingers. And Harry had never felt so torn, as though he had left one half of him back with his friends – who would still be waiting for him, piping hot dinner set on the little dining table in their apartment.

Another swallow forced its way down the tight lump in his throat. “I’d better leave,” he whispered, because he didn’t even have enough air left in him to choke on.

“Yes,” Riddle said, in a cool voice. He had noticed Harry’s scrutiny of his ring, no doubt, but he made no effort to hide it away. “You’d better.”

Harry gave a jerky nod, before moving, as if stupefied, to the door. He didn’t bother with a word of farewell, swinging the door open with trembling arms, and neither did Riddle.

The bell above the shop dinged as Harry treaded tentatively onto the cobblestone roads of an unknown era. He stepped out from under the awning, and the sunlight danced like gentle hands of fire on his skin.


	2. Quiet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Firstly, thank you to all the readers and all the people who have been so incredibly supportive of this fic and me. I'm too grateful to you angels and I don't have enough words to contain all my love. You've been wonderful and kind and I couldn't ask for more. Thank you for worrying about me.
> 
> For some of you who may have wondered about me disappearing into the void - I did make a post about it but I don't suppose all of you came across it, so I'll just link it [here](https://mizulis.tumblr.com/post/627980438623911936/regarding-stars-hide-your-fires).
> 
> Secondly, I feel the need to mention that the story has undergone and will undergo both major and minor edits. So old readers, if you were planning to reread the chapters as I posted them, I would definitely encourage it. Especially since later chapters may even end up altered in their entirety.
> 
> Thirdly, there will unfortunately not be an update next week! Exam season is upon me.
> 
> And that's all. Enjoy!

Close to midnight of April 24, 1950, Harry pressed his fingertips to the front page of the Daily Prophet until it crinkled.

His throat burned, even though he had yet to take a sip of his Firewhiskey. Newspapers lay scattered around him, and he didn’t know whether to chuck them into the fireplace or bundle them away with him. He could barely look upon the dates – three decades before his birth – but his eyes kept straying to the delicate etchings of ink on paper.

The Prophet hadn’t changed much, and yet it was barely recognizable. The same gigantic letters, shifting cleverly across the page. The same sensational headlines, unabashed in their flourish. But if he focused long enough to read the fine print, to trace the features of moving faces both familiar and not–

A pleasant-looking witch, apparently the current Minister for Magic, named Wilhelmina Tuft. A stark-haired wizard photographed only in brief glimpses before a full-page spread covered his defeat and imprisonment – Gellert Grindelwald. And, with a considerably shorter beard, face smoother and eyes somewhat less weary – the cheerful smile of Albus Dumbledore.

He was barely in two or three of the papers, withdrawn from the world as he was at Hogwarts, but the text was peppered with references to him and his accomplishments.

He would be at the height of his splendour in these years. With feather-light fingers, Harry brushed the black-and-white rendition of the Headmaster of Hogwarts – no. He would be Deputy Headmaster, still.

Strangely enough, it was that realization which disrupted the rhythm of his steady, even breaths.

The familiar din of the Leaky Cauldron subsided as though a _muffliato_ had been cast. Scraping back his chair, Harry made to stand – but the strength seeped out from his limbs, and instead he pressed his forehead to the edge of the table. The cold glass of Firewhiskey came to rest against his throbbing temple.

Every breath was a shallow rasp. He swallowed several times to clear the nausea threatening to overwhelm him.

He had travelled fifty years into the past.

What little theory he knew – what meagre knowledge Hermione had pelted him with erratically over the years – was utterly contradicted by Harry’s bizarre feat.

Which he should have expected. His life had been quiet too long, like stagnant pools and watery graves, like a glassy lake concealing a horde of Inferi.

He should have seen this coming.

 _“Your existence is almost a contradiction. It’s a little unbelievable you haven’t been dragged down to the Department of Mysteries and made part of some extensive research study yet,”_ Hermione had commented offhandedly to him once. _“I assume your celebrity status has something to do with it, though.”_

Well, that ruled out the possibility of approaching the Ministry for help.

He lay there awhile as the comforting noises of quiet conversation and laughter began to dwindle, for all appearances just another passed-out drunk on the ancient tables of the Leaky Cauldron. Harry’s fingers were numb from grasping the chilled glass, though the Firewhiskey inside must be lukewarm by now. Tasteless.

But even the numbness had to fade.

As the hour hand of the clock slid past midnight and inched closer to one, one realization after another flowed into Harry’s mind – gradual at first, like viscous honey, before speedily transitioning to a barraging hailstorm.

 _Dumbledore was alive_. Dumbledore could help him. From snapshots of his childhood, from moments captured in a sunlit tower and a moonlit castle, Dumbledore was omniscient and omnipotent as the first time Harry had met him. The wintry abandoned classroom and the Mirror of Erised and words lost yet unfaded among so many others.

_“It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.”_

But as the years rolled by like a slow montage, soaked in the sepia tones of nostalgia, Harry thought of the Headmaster’s distance in his fifth year, his shivering form atop the Astronomy Tower in sixth year, and the numerous untold truths of his life which unfurled after his death, amidst Harry’s stolen seventh year.

And here Harry was, gazing upon the black-and-white face of an Albus Dumbledore freshly lauded with glory. Vanquisher of the Dark Lord Grindelwald, master of the fabled Elder Wand. An Albus Dumbledore too close to his turbulent youth for anyone’s comfort.

Releasing a hiss of a breath, Harry folded the Prophet closed upon Dumbledore’s grainy, tired smile.

Could he afford to approach _anyone_ with his secrets? Hermione’s face was practically engraved into his mind by now, the reproving glint in her eye painfully familiar.

He had to remember what was at stake. Even if he knew nothing about time travel and paradoxes and the tenuous fabric which held the universe together, he could grasp at a few guesses of all that could go wrong. An entire timeline, a world at peace, a society on the brink of rebuilding itself, _the people he loved_ –

Harry fluttered his eyes closed.

Tom Riddle was alive.

Tom Riddle was alive, and twenty-three, mocking disoriented Floo-travellers and charming snooty purebloods at Borgin and Burkes…

…where he would meet Hepzibah Smith.

Or had he already met her? The pensieve memories he had once painstakingly memorized swam in front of his eyes. Riddle had been older – not by much, but older, so the woman wouldn’t be killed until the mid-1950s.

Which meant two horcruxes. The diary and the ring. Tom Riddle had already split his soul twice, murdered without remorse, framed two innocent lives for the demises of Myrtle Warren and his paternal family.

And in a few years, he would have two more.

Harry could kill him now. The wood of the table beneath his forehead felt as polished as the handle of wand, and the weight of the holly was calling to him from the folds of his robes. Harry could kill Lord Voldemort before two wars were waged in his name, before countless people, wizards and muggles alike, lost their lives to the vicious magic of his Death Eaters.

But the horcruxes complicated things.

Seven horcruxes or two, Voldemort could not die as long as his soul lay scattered in fragments across Britain.

Harry had no basilisk venom, no practice with casting the uncontrollable storm that was _fiendfyre_ , and he had never even successfully uttered the Killing curse. For all that he was an auror, for all that he had done through the years of the war, there were some things he never sought to explore, some lines he never crossed, some skills he had never expected to _need_.

But to leave history undisturbed–

Harry bit into his lips until the copper flavour of blood exploded on his tongue. In that moment, he could have crawled out of his skin and watched it disintegrate.

In the three years since the Battle of Hogwarts, all was well. All was gentle and flourishing and _quiet._

For all that he was an auror, for all that he had done through the years of the war, Harry’s life had been quiet too long.

And now, some cursed candle in the dusty nooks of Borgin and Burkes had more or less dropped an opportunity in his lap. To unravel the threads that made up time, yes – but to save millions of lives as he did. His parents. Neville’s parents. Fred. Remus, Tonks, Hedwig, _Sirius_ –

Himself.

The thought came to him unbidden, a sneaking intrusion, and he discarded it as though it was a snitch with a broken, flightless wing. He didn’t yet know how his existence as Harry James Potter could survive the obliteration of Tom Marvolo Riddle. Too much of their lives had been entwined – but he could save everyone else. He could destroy the phantom of a monster that was this era’s Voldemort. Before he irrevocably came into his destined grotesqueness.

He could make a difference. A risky difference, but a significant one.

“You all right there, lad?”

Harry’s head snapped up, and the ensuing rush of blood made him dizzy enough to sway.

When his vision cleared, he found himself gazing into a recognisable face – Tom the barkeep, a frown of concern marring his youthful features. Behind him, the Leaky Cauldron was all but deserted.

Harry felt a guilty flush warming his face. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you had to close up–”

“Quite all right,” Tom assured, but his frown didn’t ease.

“I’m fine. Really, I’m not even drunk,” Harry insisted, even though his full glass of Firewhiskey spoke for itself. “I’m just – how much do I owe you?”

Tom squinted into his face before slowly enunciating, “A sickle.”

Harry paused in his fumbling – of course, there would be inflation – before handing over one of the silver coins tucked away in his inner pocket. “How much for a room?”

“Four sickles a night.” Tom drew back as Harry stood up. “Where’re you from?”

“Little Whinging,” Harry mumbled, mentally counting the coins he had carried from the future. “Do you know if there are any vacancies in any of the shops in Diagon right now?”

Tom shrugged, leading him through the interior of the pub, to the inn hidden away behind a nondescript door. “You could try asking at Magical Menagerie. Not too sure, though.”

Harry hummed, thanking Tom absent-mindedly as he was shown to his room, before collapsing facedown on his mattress. Galleons, sickles and knuts alike dug into his chest uncomfortably, so he shifted to the side before closing his eyes. If time travel lag was a thing, he could feel it catching up to him, weighing down his eyelids and turning his thoughts sluggish enough to resemble a miasma…

And he drifted off, sinking into dreams of Ron and Hermione and the cosiness of the Burrow, his memories tinged a fiery blue.

* * *

The faces of his friends and the blue of the candle flame inevitably steered his footsteps in the direction of Knockturn Alley the next morning.

Harry’s first stop, after breakfast, had been Magical Menagerie, but the owner had only ducked her head apologetically at him before explaining the vacancy had recently been filled. He had intended to check the other shops upon hearing that, perhaps some of the less frequented ones, but his gaze had strayed to the darkened gap which formed the entrance to Knockturn Alley.

And Harry, against his better instinct, had allowed the gloom to swallow him.

The shops pressed close together in Knockturn, windows blacked out or encrusted with grime, so not a hint of light fell onto its cobbled roads. Even the raucousness of Diagon seemed to abruptly silence itself, as though consumed by a void. In the shadows of awnings, of nooks and crannies, loitered the dredges of wizarding society – hags, vampires, warlocks, hit wizards, fortune-tellers whose predictions only foretold doom, peddlers of trinkets marinated in vicious curses. The further Harry walked, the tighter he gripped his wand, pulling forward the hood of his cloak to conceal his face.

When he passed Borgin and Burkes, he flitted a glance to it, barely pausing in his stride but narrowing his focus on the shifting silhouettes within. Borgin and Burkes was one of the few shops whose windowfronts were thrown open to the world beyond, proudly displaying its wares, its collection of Dark curiosities from around the world, to potential customers and law enforcement alike.

A tall figure was ordering artefacts along the shelves, one arm outstretched. And as though sensing Harry’s gaze on him, the figure began to turn.

Then Harry was past, darting into the shade and venturing deeper into Knockturn Alley. Borgin and Burkes may have been the point of origin for this entire calamity, but Harry rather doubted it could offer him the answers he needed.

_“That’s a fairly new acquisition.”_

Borgin’s words were a painful memento of how grim the situation truly was. For all Harry knew, the artefact which spat him out of a fireplace in the year 1950 had not even been created yet.

Although, if the candle _was_ in existence, but had not yet found its way to Borgin and Burkes, then the only option available to Harry was… research.

A soft smile slipped onto his lips, for the word itself was so drenched in memories of Hermione. There was an ache in the air, to see her again, and Ron and Ginny and Luna…

If he found a way back, he would take it. If he could seek a clue about the artefact that had dumped him across space and time, he had to grab it with greedy fingers. And if he couldn’t…

If Harry stayed trapped, he had something to protect. Something to save. A world where his friends were alive and smiling in the evening light of the Burrow, meeting for drinks every weekend, storming to the top in their careers – he had to make sure that future was unaltered. Preserved somewhere, safe and untouchable, no matter what happened to him.

No matter what he did.

His wandering scrutiny fell on a tinted glass door, declaring _Ombre’s Olde Bookshop_ in painted enamel.

The shop was narrow, a mere door sandwiched between two low-hanging lanterns upon faded brick. Tucked away between a sprawling apothecary boasting exclusive sale of vampire fangs, and a dim, nameless store which reeked of somnolescent lavender incense. If he hadn’t been idling in this part of Knockturn, Harry would have barely noticed the darkened door. Yet, if he sought knowledge on the nature of the Dark artefacts, perhaps a bookstore obscured by the oddities of Knockturn was the best place to start.

And perhaps he could seek some knowledge on soul magic too. If he knew where to look, perhaps somewhere in this shop he would find arcane knowledge of horcruxes and their mortality…

Harry pushed the door open, and a bell jangled above him.

A figure zipped out from the sudden obscurity which blinded him after the outdoors. Harry almost didn’t notice her, blinking rapidly to clear his vision before raising his eyes to the towering stacks of books deluging the shop.

“You a customer?” asked the petite young witch who stood in front of him. Her voice had a twanging accent to it, her straw-coloured hair cut short and choppy around her cheeks. Her eyes seemed to rake over Harry with a piercing precision, and he self-consciously glanced over his cloak, quietly ensuring the transfiguration charms he had spelled onto his auror robes hadn’t faded.

“I’m just looking,” Harry answered, his voice dropping to a whisper in the murkiness of the shop.

“So, you one of those ‘just looking’ sorts,” the witch drawled in a decidedly unimpressed tone. “No offense, mister, but you don’t look as if you can afford my merchandise.”

Harry raised a brow. He was no stranger to being judged in such a snappish manner, but this was only the fourth person he had talked to since he found himself in this era. The fifties must be full of people like her and Riddle. “You sure about that?” He cast his gaze about the shop. “What’s your price range?”

“Anywhere between fifty galleons to ten thousand,” the witch deadpanned.

Harry turned to gape at her. The urge to fidget was overwhelming as she began to laugh drolly.

“Don’t look so shocked, now,” she chided through a grin, which sported a chipped front tooth. “My shop has ‘olde’ in the name! We don’t exactly sell mass paperbacks here, do we? You want school textbooks, you head to Flourish and Blotts.”

“No,” Harry said numbly, before blurting, “Are you hiring?”

The witch’s eyebrows almost touched her hairline at his sudden enquiry. “Well,” she said slowly, “I’m not looking for any sales clerks or anything like that, if that’s what you were hoping to apply for. But–” she gestured to the space around her – and Harry noticed that, thought it was narrow and cramped, it stretched almost infinitely behind her, “–if you can arrange these books into something resembling order by the end of the week… I’ll take you on permanently.”

Harry licked his lips and let his gaze rove about the tomes covering every inch of every surface – from the barely visible shelves, to the settees, tables and chairs, to the counter off to the side, to the elongated corridor he could see beyond. Gilded, faded, desiccated, sheaves of parchment hanging loose out of some covers, binding tattered in others, the books were bound to survival by nothing short of magic and a miracle.

“You just want them arranged,” he verified, his voice tentative in the silent store. “Nothing else?”

“We’ll move to the rest later,” the owner assured him, her grin resurfacing, sharp-edged but appeased. “Arrange them any way you like – by author, alphabetically, by genre. The goal is to make them easier to find.”

 _But you could just use an_ accio _for that_.

Harry didn’t voice his thought – after all, he didn’t know how summoning spells could interact with the magic imbued in these books.

“Don’t worry if you don’t have experience restoring antique books. I’m an expert, I can teach you about that.” The witch canted her head to the side, awaiting Harry’s response.

Harry cast one last look about the shop. The bookstore, dim though it was, needed but a few _lumos_ charms to illume and enliven it. Immersed in the scent of musty books and aged parchment, and the intangible weight of forbidden magic, it was easy to imagine himself back in the Hogwarts Library, on one of his midnight jaunts through the Restricted Section.

He could work here.

“I’ll be compensated?” he breathed at last, though his mind was already made up.

“Three galleons a week,” the witch promised. “Once I’ve taken you on.”

Harry nodded, his shoulders losing some of their tautness, and she held out her hand for him to shake.

“I didn’t catch your name,” said Harry, clasping her fingers and squeezing once.

“Nerissa,” she replied, and though she didn’t offer a last name, Harry guessed it must be Ombre, considering the name of the shop. “You can start from tomorrow.”

Just as Harry was about to depart from the cool interior of the bookstore, Nerissa called after him. “You didn’t give me your name!”

He turned back, one hand curled around the handle of the door, prepared to pull. “Harry.”

“Harry what?”

Which wasn’t fair, really, considering Nerissa hadn’t explicitly stated her own last name. But he couldn’t argue that point without appearing childish or overly familiar, could he?

“…Potter,” he settled on, finally, because Potter was a fairly common surname. A grumbling sort of whimsy rose up in him – who came up with these pureblood names anyway? Nott, Parkinson, Black…

But Nerissa’s eyes had already narrowed suspiciously at his mop of unruly hair, and Harry made a vain effort to press it flat against his head. “Any relation to Fleamont Potter?”

“No,” Harry replied quickly. “I’m an orphan.”

Nerissa hummed in what he assumed was condolence, but Harry was gone before she could say another word.

It was halfway down Knockturn Alley, with the colours of Diagon visible through the gap between buildings, that Nerissa’s statement warped and shifted before swathing the entirety of his mind.

Fleamont Potter – his grandfather – was alive.

Harry came to a stuttering halt in the middle of the dismal road, oblivious to the group of chattering hags somewhere behind him, oblivious to the crow corpses strung up by their feet at a nearby stall. His grandfather, his grandmother, his entire family – the Potters – were alive in this time.

His parents, meanwhile, had not even been born yet.

Flights of fantasy wrapped themselves like multi-hued ribbons around his thoughts as Harry shuffled out into the throng of Diagon. He was succumbing to this bedazzlement too often, but how could he help himself?

What would it be like, to have his own version of the Burrow to return to, after a gruelling day at work? To have grandparents doting on him, aunts and uncles to jest with him, to share anecdotes and inside jokes over dinner and treacle tarts?

The Weasleys had fell into it so easily. Hermione’s family, though smaller, had shone so brilliant whenever Harry met them – be it through his school years, or when Hermione brought them back to Britain after the war.

But they were just that – fantasies – and the gold-tinged daydreams greyed and shrivelled in his mind. They were the decay of a cherished impossibility, but he had to concentrate on what was important–

Finding a way home.

And destroying Tom Riddle.

He cast a last fleeting look at the entrance to Knockturn Alley, into the dingy, winding road beyond, and imagined he could make out a hanging plaque – swaying lightly in the breeze as it announced the presence of Borgin and Burkes.

* * *

Tom Riddle glanced at the sign above as it creaked in protest against its hinges, caught in the wafting wind that wove its way through Knockturn Alley.

The apartment that consisted of his modest lodgings lay somewhere further inside the alley, off in one of the many discreet capillaries slicing their way through wizarding Britain’s seedier shopping district. Tom, however, once the click of the locking charms resounded firmly in his ears, headed in the opposite direction – towards Diagon, and its fine establishments.

He had business tonight, of the curious and unexpected sort, which made it all the more… interesting. Things had been quietening, his associates falling into the shallow waters of complacency, but tonight would be the impetus to drive these grinding cogs into a flurry of action.

The night sky stretched clear and starry above him as he walked, brightly-lit shopfronts spilling their welcoming warmth onto the sidewalk. For some reason, Diagon Alley after dark had always reminded him of Christmas morning at Hogwarts – crisp, cheery, with not many to left to partake in its humble charm.

 _The Silver Sphinx_ complemented the picture with its own soft elegance. Gentle notes of music strung from gilded harps and drifted through the air. The warble of a central fountain filled the gaps in conversation with its muted melody. A sprawling hall lay before him, dotted with sparse tables, and he could sense the tingle of privacy charms woven into the fabric of each white spread.

Tom ignored the house-elf who bowed before him as he entered, merely following the wrinkled creature to where he could see his followers waiting. He had never cared for house-elves, obsequious as they were, small and frail and weak, but they served their purposes. They were certainly little more than a trace of the flamboyant luxury the purebloods so liked to flaunt. The Slytherins Tom had grown up with had never been intimately familiar with the way skin scraped off one’s fingertips in winter, scrubbed raw from washing countless dishes under freezing water.

They would flinch and recoil, if they knew. The purebloods were small and frail and _weak_ , after all, but they served their purposes.

“There he is,” Cygnus said with his signature grin, all gleaming teeth and crinkled eyes, the first to notice Tom’s arrival.

Walburga turned at his pronouncement, and pouted when she caught sight of the approaching figure. “You’re so late, Tom!”

“Apologies,” Tom placated smoothly. “I was held up by a customer.”

“You’re not that late,” Druella assured him with a laugh, elbowing Walburga playfully. “We haven’t even ordered anything yet.”

“How’s… how’s work then?” Nicholas asked. His mouth had an odd twist at the end, coiling around the word _work_ as though unsure whether he was enunciating it correctly. It was subtle, an almost imagined inflection, but Tom caught it with ease.

Slytherin was only one-part masquerade. The rest was incisiveness, the precise spinning and unravelling of webs.

“It’s progressing well.” Tom’s voice was deliberately curt as he slid a menu close and skimmed its various items.

“Cygnus is paying,” butted in Dominique, tossing back her dark, curling hair. “It’s a celebration – his brother is finally leaving Britain.”

“Alphard secured his apprenticeship, then?”

Orion shot the tablecloth a sour glare. “Oh, yes. You should have heard him bragging about it. Apparently, herbology is a big deal in Mongolia.”

“I suppose he has worked rather hard for it.” Tom kept his words conciliatory, his eyebrows furrowed in mild sympathy, but the news of Alphard Black departing Britain for several years to come was indeed something to celebrate. Alphard had always been too much of a muggle sympathiser for Tom to predictably control.

“I suppose,” Orion grumbled, tapping his wand sullenly against several items on his menu.

Edward was observing his antics with a smirk on his face, a smirk which he turned upon Tom. “What do you do there all day, Tom? Cooped up with Caractacus day in and day out – I can’t imagine it, honestly.”

Tom paused.

It was uncharacteristic of Edward to be this loose-limbed with company, so loose-lipped with conversation. Had he been speaking to one of the others, it might have been pleasantly amusing — an unexpected forwardness, a cracking of a shell.

But Tom was not the others.

At times, it appalled him, that this was the nature of the followers he had gathered, the pioneers of the society he planned to change, the families he needed to realize his ambitions. He had assumed, once, that Slytherin was the ideal house to mould them into a force to be reckoned with – lethal grace and sharp etiquette, backed by power and privilege. Had he been too idealistic in his youth? Or was it a product of this stagnating time, this dulling of their senses, of refinement, of intelligence?

Had he expected too much of people clearly too inferior to him to be of any consequence?

Something of his thoughts must have shown on his face, because Edward was flinching away, his familiar skittishness creeping over his shoulders, lips pursed until they were white.

“I–” Edward stuttered. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to speak out of bounds.”

Tom merely hummed noncommittally, before replying in a neutral tone, “Since you’re so very curious, Edward, let me be the first to reassure you Caractacus is hardly ever in the shop. I manage the day-to-day affairs, mostly.”

He would have stopped there. He _should_ have stopped there. But–

– _he didn’t have to_ –

–there was a spiderweb crack, a hairline fracture, somewhere below his skin, and it was _itching_ to burst open, to quake into action.

So he opened his mouth, his own voice distant, and said, “I must say, I do get to witness the most fascinating events, at times.”

His Knights were all staring at him now, and he drank in their expressions, relishing both the false veneer and the real temerity sparking across their faces.

“Why,” Tom went on, propping his chin on a loosely curled hand, “only yesterday, a lost young man fell out of our Floo, muttering excuses about how he intended to be in Diagon Alley. He was clad in auror robes, yet he claimed not to be an auror. And the way he spoke, sometimes, was exceptionally strange, twisting words in combinations he might have creatively invented on the spot. But most importantly–”

His eyes slid to Edward as he punctuated his tirade with a heavy pause. “ _He knew my name_ , when I did not offer it. Well, then. Do you have any theories about what could possibly explain this odd string of characteristics? Since it could, potentially, pose a risk to my plans.”

The others followed his gaze, as he had been confident they would, to Edward, who only shrank in his chair. Tom waited, wondering if they would ask, or if Edward would break under the weight of their questioning gazes and volunteer the information on his own.

And as he had hoped, it was the latter.

“Tom wrote me yesterday,” Edward confessed quietly, eyes fastened to the tablecloth. “So I already know all this. I’ve forwarded the information to Abraxas, my Lord, and he’s making inquiries at the DMLE. It’s why he hasn’t joined us today.”

Tom released a slow breath, forcing his face to remain blank, his eyes to soften. That pounding at his temples was receding somewhat. Though scathing instinct had overwhelmed him a moment ago, it wouldn’t do to alienate his followers over petty irritations…

…and yet, these unsteady reins he held over his emotions, when his facades had been impeccable before, had only loosened over the past few years. At times, these hairline fractures cracked like ice, like frostbitten skin, like a physical ache threatening to rip his marrow from his bones.

And Tom did not why.

He had thought, once, that death was the only thing he could truly fear.

And it was, but this ignorance, this loss of lucidity, came close. It was yet another thing which could make him fallible, which could make him _less_. And when he could not even comprehend his invisible enemies, the first stirrings of fear were bound to try and ensnare his senses.

The chair was soft, grounding, as he leant back into it, his shoulders losing their tension. Edward was still gazing fixedly upon the tablecloth, and Tom had to suppress another sigh of frustration at the sight. He waved a hand indulgently, as though batting his emotions away.

“Continue,” he spoke, his voice a hollow blankness, because, after all, he came here for business tonight.

“There’s not much we’ve been able to find about him.” Edward’s confession was whispered, on the verge of cracking over his words. “It seems he’s little more than an… apparition.”

“He is not, I assure you.” Tom rested a hand against the table and raised the other to his chin, stroking his mouth as he mulled over Edward’s report. Inevitably, his mind drifted to the day before–

_A flash of green eyes, burning cold as they seemed to look right through Tom–_

–and he released a disappointed sigh. “Keep looking.”

Edward's shoulders had visibly hunched in anticipation of Tom's reaction, but he relaxed somewhat at the casually uttered words.

Tom's thoughts, however, continued to circle around the events of yesterday, akin to sharks circling a single blossom of blood in oceanwater.

Gradually, as though withered flowers blooming back to life, the strained conversation eased, receding into familial gossip and gushing over the several courses of their meal.

Tom barely noticed, his mind distant and wondering.


	3. Obscurity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter isn't meant to be up yet, but it's been a stressful week and I needed to focus on something other than studies.
> 
> Fun fact: the previous title of this chapter was "Broken Cobblestones", and I chose it before I ever listened to Folklore. Taylor and I really be vibing.

On his fourth day working at Nerissa’s little shop, Harry asked her about cheap lodgings close to their place of work.

“New to town, are you?” She tossed her head in the direction of the door. “Knockturn Alley is crawling with cheap places for rent, if you’re willing to accept a bit of filth. And the general risk of being murdered in your sleep so your heart can be harvested, of course.”

Harry, whose thoughts flipped like a photo album over all the nights he had spent asleep in the Forest of Dean, whose fingertips danced in the air as he charted out all the warding spells he could weave, nodded. “Sounds perfect.”

Ombre’s Olde Bookshop was cluttered with books so fragile they reminded Harry of new-born crups and kneazles. He wielded them with shaky palms, casting preservation charms wherever possible, until Nerissa could begin restoring them. Countless hardbacks brought forth fond memories of _The Monster Book of Monsters_ , except one of them tried to sink its fangs into his wrist.

(“It would’ve sucked you dry like a leech and used your magic to strengthen its ritual power.” Nerissa had grinned brightly.)

The occasional muggle paperback was also unearthed amidst the ancient cornucopia.

(“That’s mine!” Nerissa had darted forward to yank away a thumbed-through copy of _Brave New World_. “You can keep that.” She offered an apathetic nod to the pristine edition of _The Collected Works of William Shakespeare_ which lay forgotten in Harry’s hands.)

Eventually, it became evident the books were not all texts and treatises on the Dark Arts. They were antiques, true, and limited editions – rarities in the world of knowledge and ritual and magical theory, but they transcended all branches of magic. Harry found a book on rearing wyverns for their wings right alongside one exploring the lore on phoenixes.

The shop itself, whose shadows sunk into a coruscating warmth after Harry threaded _lumos_ spells into the patterned ceiling, was rather strange in its construction. 

The front of the store was little more than a small square chamber, where stood the counter and a few seating arrangements – all, of course, stifled under Nerissa's books.

Books were, in fact, all that the eye could see. Stacks of them divided the space into curling corridors, and Harry was left with mere inches to tiptoe through the shop. Even the nooks lining the walls brimmed with leather and old parchment, as though these rare tomes had been flung inside — stuffed upon one another until they grudgingly promised not to crash to the floor.

At the back of the chamber was a long corridor, cast in obscurity.

Empty shelves lined either side, waiting to be filled, but it wasn't the glaring lack of titles which caught Harry's eyes.

It was, instead, the veritable pyramid of books at the end of the corridor. A pyramid which stretched from floor to ceiling, each marbled cover aligning faultlessly with the next.

Meticulous and deliberate. Everything Nerissa's shop was not.

At first, Harry assumed the reasoning behind this curiosity lay in the books themselves. But when he examined the titles his curious hands could reach, taking care not to disturb the arrangement of the pyramid, he found nothing unusual about them.

They were as common as any book in Nerissa's shop could be — _Beasts of Myth and Beasts of Magic, The Wayward Soul, An Introductory Guide to Druidism._

Harry could think of nothing to connect the titles either, no rhyme nor reason to the selection of the books. A collection of essays on transmogrification lay nestled below a treatise on protective talismans. 

Perhaps if the back of the shop hadn't been so shrouded in darkness, if it hadn't been utterly devoid of any charms or candles to light his way, Harry would have caught the purpose of the pyramid sooner.

It wasn't until he shimmied to the side, flattening himself against a wall, that the glint of a brass sphere caught his eye.

A door.

The pyramid was not a fancy arrangement of pretty covers, it was a smokescreen. A wall bricked with ancient books, concealing a narrow, black-enamelled _door_.

He could have dismantled the pyramid of books. It would have taken hours, maybe even a day, but he could have done it. 

When he asked Nerissa about it, though, she gave him an odd look. Choosing not to answer, she left him with nothing but a cryptic warning against moving the blockade or opening the door.

Climbing over the books would technically break none of those rules, Harry mused, as Nerissa disappeared down the corridor. Perhaps he would try it after he had worked at the shop awhile.

On his fifth day, Harry realized the customers visiting the shop consisted entirely of the upper crust of the wizarding world.

Although they arrived in drips and trickles, merely two or three in a day, their faces melded together like wax in the summer heat. Perhaps Harry should have made more of an effort to familiarise himself with the etchings on their signet rings, with the shades of their hair, the peculiarities of their eyes. 

But he could hardly bring himself to do so, when the slightest arch of a brow or curve of a chin could serve as a reminder of their silver-green-garbed children. Or worse, of some Death Eater behind a flash of vicious spellfire.

It was easier to let the click of the door wash away his memory of each interaction. Especially since Nerissa never seemed unfamiliar with their names.

Harry knew for a fact she had no written records of her customers nor their orders — _"Don't you think we have enough books in here without a register harassing us too?"_ — but she was yet to forget a face or a request.

She was never the one to greet her clients either, ushering Harry to the door the moment the bell jingled.

“The clientele will only expand once we’re established,” she reproached, each time he made a face. “The shadier customers only turn up after you’ve gained a reputation for discretion. You better get used to dealing with them.”

“Why don’t you do it?” Harry’s voice had sounded like a whine to his own ears, and so he had clicked his mouth shut, before shaking his head and returning to the task of spelling several shelves clean.

The dust in the shop had a habit of refusing to move, rejecting his magic. If audacity could be worn by dust motes, Harry was certain the ones in Nerissa's shop were living proof of it. He took to blowing on the shelves instead, gleefully watching the reluctant manner in which the dust swept away from its home.

Nerissa never offered to answer his complaints and questions. It was, Harry assumed, as though she resented social pleasantries with a passion that surpassed his own.

* * *

On his sixth day, Harry met the Albus Dumbledore of the year 1950.

* * *

Harry was rushing down the sidewalk, darting in and out of the colourful throngs of morning workers, cursing the stretch of cobblestone between Diagon Alley and the depths of Knockturn.

He had wanted to hunt for a spare apartment at some point. But with no knowledge of the twisting streets of Knockturn, and no guide to aid his search, a cloud of apprehension had kept him confined to the safe, familiar walls of the Leaky Cauldron.

Which was inconvenient, to say the least. 

He knew he should find alternative lodgings, and soon. His stock of coins wasn’t infinite. It would be smart — _prudent_ , Hermione would say — to have some money left over, saved for a rainy day, before he spent it all on luxuries he could not afford.

Eyes on the approaching entrance to Knockturn Alley, he didn’t realize the path he was taking until it brought him to a halt in the form of a collision.

Harry stumbled back. His fingers flew to his glasses, straightening them, and he blinked against what looked like a violent assault on his vision. 

Lurid yellow _everywhere_. 

A hand closed around his bicep.

“Careful there, my boy.”

He looked up, and the breath was stolen from his lungs. Auburn hair, twinkling blue eyes, and a crinkled smile.

“Professor Dumbledore,” Harry spoke in a stuttered exhale.

Dumbledore’s smile didn’t fade in the slightest. He was apparently used to being recognized and gaped at wherever he went. “Are you all right?”

There were too many people who asked him that question in the fifties. 

“How are you not at Hogwarts?” Harry blurted, before he could think better of it.

He really needed to learn how to keep his errant mouth in check.

Dumbledore frowned, leaning back a little once he was assured Harry was not concussed from crashing into his chest. “Hogwarts? The school is closed for the summer, my boy.”

“Oh. Right.”

Harry knew Dumbledore had reasons in the negative for wishing to stop and chatter with a stranger in the streets. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to end their conversation. “What – what brings you to Diagon Alley, Professor?”

The blue of Dumbledore’s eyes was… marred. By what, Harry couldn't be certain.

Confusion? Curiosity?

“Forgive me if I don’t recall correctly, my memory fails me with age,” Dumbledore chortled, and Harry snapped back to attention. “But were you ever one of my students?”

Harry blanked out.

Panic swamped him, blind and incoherent, before he rapidly rifled through the foreign schools he had fleetingly heard of. “No, I was…”

Durmstrang, Beauxbatons, Ilvermony – Mahoutokoro, maybe, and Uagadou? and Koldor – Koldov–

He gave up. “I was home-schooled.”

Dumbledore’s eyes cleared, and he nodded in sympathy. “The war drew many of us away from our usual haunts, did it not?”

…What? 

It was harder than he could have imagined it would be. To discuss a war he had never been a part of, with a young, alive Dumbledore, in 1950.

Harry was no stranger to lies, nor was he a stranger to war, but nothing in the world could have prepared him for _this._

“…Yes,” he answered, stitching half-truths from the patchwork of his own interrupted childhood. “My parents were huge supporters of yours,” he tacked on, at the end, because he could tell from the shiftiness in Dumbledore’s gaze that the man was about to dismiss him and be on his way.

It was selfish, and underhanded.

But Harry, for the life of him, could not simply leave.

“Your parents.” Dumbledore’s smile was bright as he nodded agreeably. “Perhaps I taught them. You do bear a striking resemblance to someone I must know…”

Fuck.

“…Tell me, are you perhaps of any relation to the Potters?”

Harry barely prevented himself from cursing out loud. “No,” he said, too hastily, and resisted the urge to cringe. “I mean, my last name is Potter.” His laugh was borderline manic. “But I’m an orphan, so it can’t be.”

Dumbledore’s face fell. “Oh, my condolences. I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories for you.”

“It’s fine.” There was a sudden vulnerability chipping away at Harry's voice, and he confessed in a whisper, “It was a long time ago."

When did the twinkle in Dumbledore's eyes disappear? He seemed to be… circumspect, almost. His gaze both piercing and contemplative.

Dumbledore hummed. “Well, one must not linger on the past.”

He smiled cheerily once more, and although Harry was sure the comment was little more than words thrown to the cobblestones, it settled, serpentine, around the depths of throat.

“Right,” Harry croaked. “I’ll… It was nice seeing you.”

There was a chill pulling at his muscles. Harry’s need to stay in Dumbledore’s company had been extinguished with the abruptness of the sun obscuring itself on a cloudy day.

Dumbledore was too close to all the things Harry wanted to avoid in the past.

Or, perhaps, not wanted. But needed to avoid.

“Nice to meet you too, my boy,” Dumbledore bid him a sunny farewell, before ambling away down Diagon Alley. His bumblebee-patterned robes swished and glared with every step.

Harry didn’t know what possessed him to do it, really.

But in the next moment, he had flitted to the gap between shopfronts at the mouth of Knockturn Alley, before plastering himself flat into the shadows and poking his head around the corner.

He watched as Dumbledore passed several shops, ignoring the awed faces in the crowd, the delectable scents of roasted chestnuts, the haggling shouts from the nearby stalls. Coming to a halt a good distance away, Dumbledore glanced into a window, before pushing open a door and disappearing inside a shop.

Harry’s eyes darted to the sign above the storefront. He had to duck and squint to make it out amidst the several other plaques hanging about, but the faded gold of the letters was familiar to him.

Ollivander’s.

Harry felt a frown creeping onto his face.

Why would Dumbledore need to visit Ollivander? He already had a wand. He had two, in fact: his own and the Elder Wand–

Harry sucked in a sharp breath. Oh, fuck.

It couldn’t be, though, he tried to reassure himself, even as his pounding heartbeat drowned out his reasonings.

Nothing ever came of uniting the hallows. Harry should know, because he had been the Master of them all at some point. It led to a good deal of nothing happening, although the artefacts were powerful on their own. He never had any surreal encounters with Death, and–

And it was just a fairy tale.

So, there was no way, absolutely no way, that Harry’s ownership of the Elder Wand, fifty years into the future, could have somehow chased him across space and time.

* * *

On Harry’s seventh, and final, day of working on a trial basis with Nerissa, her shop was visited by their first ever half-blood customer.

* * *

Harry dropped the book he was holding and fell to the floor in one smooth motion.

“ _What_ is wrong with you?” Nerissa hissed.

She turned from where she had been examining the newly arranged shelves, planting her hands on her hips.

Harry ensured he was completely obscured by the mountains of tomes on the floor and on the settee by his head. Any second now, the figure he had glimpsed from behind the tinted glass would swing open the door and…

The tinkling of the bell startled Nerissa.

She rose on tiptoe and craned her neck. “Customer, Harry. Get moving.”

Harry intended to do no such thing. “Why is someone from Borgin and Burkes visiting your shop?”

“I don’t know, to buy a book?” Nerissa’s glare was tainted with incredulity. “What do you have against Borgin and Burkes?”

“Is… anyone here?” came the pleasant enquiry from the front of the shop.

Harry could just imagine him, hands tucked affably behind his back, features carefully rearranging themselves into an expression of politeness.

“Can’t you attend to this one?” Harry implored her, widening his eyes slightly and dropping his voice to a desperate whisper. “Please?”

Nerissa huffed, but darted out from their hidden nook. Harry could hear the pads of her toes, manoeuvring the teetering piles which coiled from the walls to the door.

“Sorry for the wait,” she welcomed, but Harry, who had known her for several days now, could detect the pain in her grin.

“It’s all right,” came Riddle’s reply. Harry curled in on himself, straining his ears to catch every word. “I haven’t come across your shop before. Have you newly opened?”

“Yes.” Nerissa seemed to be speaking through gritted teeth.

Harry fidgeted. Perhaps it was a poor choice, to send her to face Riddle.

Nerissa didn’t know what she was dealing with, after all.

An answering hum from Riddle, followed by a pause in which Harry knew the man would be roving curious eyes over the shop. Shrinking into himself, Harry held his breath.

“You would be Ms Ombre, then?”

“Correct.”

Another hum. Harry bit his knuckles at the thought of how irked Nerissa must be.

“I didn’t know the Ombre family had any heirs left.”

A shudder washed over Harry. He turned his head in the direction of the conversing pair.

Riddle’s tone was mild, but Harry’s intuition screamed at him to draw his wand from its holster.

“It doesn’t.” Nerissa’s words clipped, their syllables barely coherent. “Is there a particular title I can help you with?”

“‘Arcana of the Mystic East’,” Riddle informed her. “One of our clients has sought our help in locating it. I’m a representative of Borgin and Burkes,” he added, but Harry could already hear Nerissa shuffling off to one of the heaps of books, followed by the thud of several hitting the floor.

He winced.

“We’re still in the process of… decorating,” Nerissa explained, not a hint of apology in her admission.

“Of course.”

Harry’s hair rose. There was something wrong with Riddle’s voice.

An odd tenor to it, that had not been present before.

His suspicion was confirmed when, a moment later, Riddle asked cautiously, “Why are you not using your wand? Do you even have one?”

The silence which followed his question was deafening.

Harry’s fingers itched, wanting nothing more than to spring out from his hiding place and blast Riddle into oblivion.

Before Riddle could act on whatever that sinister disdain in his tone implied.

Nerissa didn’t deign to respond, and so when Riddle spoke next, his insinuation was laid bare.

“…Are you a squib?”

Harry’s heart beat a thunderous rhythm in his chest.

He had… never seen Nerissa perform magic, now that he thought of it. Never seen her wield a wand, or carry one in a holster, or a back pocket. He had seen her in muggle clothes as often as wizarding robes.

And he had never questioned why she had been so quick to hire him.

Some auror he was.

“Sir, with all due respect,” Nerissa drawled, “if you wish to make use of my services, you’ll have to leave your sneers at the doorstep.”

Which meant, in hindsight, that it had been an exceptionally stupid idea to expose her to Riddle, and Harry wanted to bash his head against the nearest pile of books.

The crackle of Riddle’s magic was as abrupt as his arrival.

It infused the small interior and smothered whatever comfort it had once held, as though squeezing the air out of its throat. Laced with the promise of violence, with fury so palpable Harry could feel it wrapping around every inch of the room.

It was choking in its intensity, and Harry struggled to breathe.

The reek of terrifying darkness soaked his lungs. His scrambled, roaring thoughts settled on Nerissa, and a wave of adrenaline mingled with his blood to propel him to action.

Harry was out from behind the stacks and facing Riddle in the space of a few seconds.

“Is there a problem here?” he demanded, one shaking fist clenched around his wand. He felt ready to vibrate out of his bones with rage, with defensiveness, with the urge to sink his nails into Riddle’s face and _rip_ –

Riddle’s undivided attention snapped to him with the swiftness of shattering glass. His turbulent magic receded from where it had besieged the shop.

“You,” Riddle breathed.

Coiling in leisurely motions, the eager tendrils of his magic reached for Harry, swathing about his limbs and neck and chest with a liquid, flowing fascination.

Harry didn’t move.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Riddle continued, tilting his head to the side and sweeping his gaze over Harry. It was an appraisal that felt simultaneously like the raking of iron nails and the tender drapery of silk.

It was so familiar, _(as familiar as a Killing curse, striking him down in the Forbidden Forest)_ , and yet… so foreign.

Glare unmitigated, Harry allowed his magic to surge free in response to the deceptively gentle spirals curling around his body. It lashed, whip-like, over Riddle’s probing, avaricious power, and Harry felt his teeth baring in a feral smile when Riddle’s eyes widened.

That fissure in the immaculate mask of Tom Riddle was almost imperceptible.

Nonetheless, it tasted like victory.

“Didn’t think I was so damn memorable, Riddle,” Harry spat out.

Like the dimming of a lightbulb, the overwhelming weight of Riddle’s magic vanished. A crooked smile had flashed on his face at Harry’s words, but it instantly melted back into distant courtesy.

“Of course, you were memorable.” Riddle brushed a hand down the front of his robes, as though he hadn’t been on the verge of attacking a moment earlier. “Like I said, not many arrive in Borgin and Burkes via Floo. None do so accidentally.”

“So sorry to interrupt.” Nerissa, who had completely slipped from Harry’s mind as he was entrapped in the maelstrom of clashing with Riddle, shifted into view. “You know this man, Harry?”

“No,” Harry grumbled.

“He’s a liar, this one.” Riddle smiled helpfully, heedless of Harry’s intensifying glower.

He was enjoying this, Harry realized with a dawning horror. Unfathomably enough, Riddle found this entire exchange delightful.

“ _Harry_ and I met only a few days ago, though he disappeared before I could properly make his acquaintance,” Riddle went on, his dark curls catching the radiance of the soft lights overhead. “And how do you know him?”

Nerissa stepped forward to stand beside Harry, crossing her arms over her chest. “Well, he’s my employee, for one.”

“Your employee?” Riddle raised a brow at Harry. “And here I was, under the impression you were an auror.”

“Oh, you mean when I specifically told you I was not?” Harry snarked.

Riddle shrugged, unrepentant. The gesture seemed so utterly humane, a simple slip of cloth over shoulder, a careless shedding of some second skin, that Harry had to blink to clear a sudden bout of vertigo.

The magic in the shop may have been reeled in, the blatant challenge locked away. But Harry could sense the rhythm of a different duel unfolding, as festooned with cracks and chaos, if not more.

“I apologize,” Riddle offered, all of a sudden.

Harry could _taste_ the curses on the tip of his tongue.

“To both of you. I’ve been quite rude.” Riddle tipped his head to the side as sheepishness slid into his voice. “I hope you can forgive me.”

There were a thousand things Harry wanted to say to that, but he forced himself to dart his gaze away from Riddle and nod.

Whatever strange mood swings and warping personas Voldemort had suffered as a retail worker — it wasn't Harry's business to figure them out.

It wasn't his business to figure Riddle out.

Next to him, he felt the tension in Nerissa’s shoulders dissipating, though her arms stayed crossed.

“Apology accepted.” She drew in a stiff breath. “You can leave now.”

Riddle paused, a darkness clouding his eyes. “The title I came for…”

“We don’t carry it.” Nerissa raised her chin haughtily, not bothering to verify her statement.

Harry squeezed the handle of his wand, his eyes shifting back to Riddle. To the way he slipped a hand inside his robe, to the hardening of his stare, to the returning sizzle of his magic, hammering against his composure, no doubt.

And then, Riddle flicked his gaze to Harry and caught his riveted eye.

The polite smile fell back on his face, as though it had never left. His hand slunk back to his side, and he nodded once.

“That’s unfortunate.” His words were aimed at Nerissa, but his eyes never strayed from Harry. “Pleasure to meet you.”

And he left, sidling out of the door with a chime of the bell and poise in his step.

Harry did not look away from the door, from the cobblestones outside which had carried Riddle's weight. The bell swung to a slow stop.

Nerissa breathed out from between her lips. “What sort of company d’you keep, Harry?”

“He’s not a friend,” Harry sniped, running a hand through his curls and pacing along the narrow spaces between the books. “I’ll just – I’ll just get back to work.”

Nerissa bent to gather the hardcovers she had disturbed, sifting through the titles and laying aside one of the tomes. “Well, would you look at that. Looks like we do carry ‘Arcana of the Mystic East’, after all.”

Harry leant forward to get a good look at the book – a thick bundle of vellum pages held between covers of rich purple, gilded with white gold. He whistled. “Looks expensive.”

“Seven hundred galleons,” Nerissa informed him, nudging the book towards Harry. “If you ever meet that man again… you can make the offer to him.”

If Harry went the rest of his promisingly short life without ever laying eyes on Tom Riddle again, it would be the greatest gift fate could bestow upon him.

He recalled Riddle’s words, the first ones he had spoken to Harry in the bookshop, uttered, he was sure, in a rare moment of lost guardedness.

_“I’ve been looking for you.”_

Harry could have swallowed ice, for his throat felt cold, scraped raw and bloodied.

If he had caught Riddle’s attention, so quickly, without even trying…

Why had he? He knew he had acted suspect that day, a good week ago now, when he had stumbled, disoriented, to find himself face to face with Tom Riddle. But had he really acted unusually enough to etch himself into Riddle's memories so thoroughly?

Or was Riddle just that bored?

Well, there was no way he could hope to be forgotten _now_.

But perhaps he could use this. He did have to destroy both Riddle and his horcruxes at some point, didn’t he? How could he do that from a distance?

And so Harry forced a grin onto his face as he looked back at Nerissa. “Right, I’ll make an offer. Are two thousand galleons enough?”

“I was thinking ten, actually.”

Harry laughed against his knuckles, but sobered just as quickly, crouching next to Nerissa as he made to pluck the book from the floor.

“You…” He licked his lips. “You know I don’t care if you’re a squib, right?”

“I wouldn’t have hired you if I thought you did, Harry.” Nerissa kept her eyes on arranging the stack in front of her, fingers nimble and deft as she ignored the plumes of dust billowing every now and then.

“Right, but… you could have told me.”

Nerissa sighed. “I could have, I chose not to. It’s nobody’s business but my own.”

“And I get that,” Harry assured her, “but, you could have told me you needed help rearranging the shop because you couldn’t use magic. I thought it was because we couldn’t use summoning charms or something around the books and–”

“And you’ve been working manually all this time?” Nerissa was aghast for a moment, before an uproarious laugh ripped from her lips.

“No, of course not.” Harry felt his cheeks warming. “I just assumed it was about summoning the books, not–”

But Nerissa’s mirth drowned out his words, the sound like autumn leaves in the wind, and Harry cracked a reluctant smile.


	4. Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is the first with major edits from the previous version. Happy Holidays!

It had been a breath of a moment.

The low hum of the Elder Wand beneath his fingers was as familiar as the slant of evening sunlight upon his wrist. It was a hovel of a home he found himself in, but Albus had seen worse over the years. Mouldy darkness and the summer chirp of cicadas was hardly something to complain about.

A little over a week had passed since Albus had awoken with a trail of a thought slipping through his head, a trail of a doubt that had him reaching for his wand at the dead hour of midnight.

_When does a Hallow meet its death?_

The handle of elder wood had been cold beneath his palm.

It shouldn’t have concerned him the way it did – when he had conquered the Deathstick away from Gellert, it had been with the intent to _end_ its bloodlust. The chill where once it had thrummed with power should have assuaged him. The mere presence of the Hallows in the world was an abnormality, an aberration of the realms that magic was allowed to dwell in.

To have the power of one snuffed out like a candle in the dark should have, inevitably, sent a rush of relief through his battle-worn bones.

It did not.

It had been five years since the ownership of the Elder Wand changed hands, and it wasn’t the first night since that Albus was kept awake with thoughts of the Deathly Hallows. Weapons of death, weapons from Death. Gellert had tracked down the Elder Wand with determination unmatched, and Albus had stumbled upon the Cloak of Invisibility quite by accident – draped about the shoulders of a second-year student, a mere prankster’s tool in the hands of one so young.

 _A family heirloom,_ Fleamont had told him, chin tucked into his chest, the abashment of a child caught wandering the castle after hours. _Please don’t confiscate it, sir._ _My father gave it to me._

Albus had let him off with a detention.

Fleamont would be older now, a man middling his life’s years, and Albus would be lying if he said he hadn’t paid close attention to the possessor of the Invisibility Cloak. But the Cloak itself stayed hidden from him, hardly flaunted as freely as it had been in Hogwarts. Had the silvery fabric faded the day the magic had seeped out of the Elder Wand’s core? Had the threads frayed, or had it lain undisturbed, unaffected by the death of its fellow Hallow?

The sun had risen with a blush over the horizon. If Albus pressed closely, the grooves of his fingertips slotting into the grain of the wood, he could sense the barest buzz of power still crawling through the wand.

But it was nowhere near the level he was familiar with. It was the weakening pulse of a bleeding vein.

For a week, the wand had pumped feeble sparks of magic into hands, until he had laid it aside to pore over his books. Fairy tales and folklore, the touch of death and wandlore. And when the books failed him, he had donned his brightest robes and ambled down to the sunlit shopfronts of Diagon Alley.

It was hard to say who had crashed into whom, what with the rush of the morning crowd and the cloudiness of Albus’ musings, with the bespectacled green eyes, blinking dazedly up at him. There had been a hint of a bruise on his ribs from the crooked metal stems that had dug into his chest.

But they had walked straight into each other. As accidental as Albus stumbling upon Fleamont Potter with his Invisibility Cloak in the dark corridors of Hogwarts.

It had been a breath of a moment. But it was enough.

The Elder Wand had _burned_. A scorching radiance against his skin – for a moment, Albus was convinced the wood had sizzled through the yellow of his robes. It was a flare of life from what he had thought a dying artefact. A spark that raised more questions than it answered.

The Elder Wand had burned, and the person blinking dazed green eyes up at him was, indubitably, a _Potter_.

He was a frazzled young man, polite and wide-eyed as a muggle-born first-year at Hogwarts. He had stumbled over his words and stuttered through small talk, and Albus had been too aware of the pulsating magic of the Elder Wand and the chipped sign of Ollivander’s shopfront to grant the stranger the attention he should have.

The young man had blurted a hasty goodbye and vanished into the bustling crowds. And the fury of the Elder Wand had fizzled to a soft thrum.

It had been clear as day, in that moment. Albus hadn’t needed to push open the door to Ollivander’s to hear his sneaking, sinking suspicion confirmed. But he walked in anyway, carried on feet too weak to drag, too weighty to float.

 _The wood and the core are as well as can be, but I must remind you, the wand chooses the wizard._ Ollivander had twirled the wand in a delicate hold before presenting it handle-first to Albus. _Which entails, then, that sometimes, the wand refuses the wizard._

All artefacts crafted by mortal hands had a shelf life, a few years granted to their survival. They could vary wildly, from a year to a century, but Death came for them all, in the end.

The Hallows had persisted against the devastation of time. The Elder Wand was a thing of fabled duels and murder, the Invisibility Cloak a prized heirloom. That, more than anything, had been proof of their existence, of their creation at the hands of forces not of the world of the living.

Albus had never considered the Hallows to be more than formidable artefacts – rare tools of necromancy, yes, but crafted from wizardry rather than otherworldly power. It had been Gellert who thumbed religiously through all renditions of the fairy tale, captivated by The Tale of The Three Brothers, by the grand idea of mastery over Death, in a literal rather than metaphorical sense.

When the magic of the Elder Wand turned sluggish in his grasp, he had wondered if Gellert had been wrong, after all.

But the Elder Wand wasn’t dying. His mastery over it was.

Which brought Albus to this evening, to this hovel of a home.

If local legend was to be believed, this had once been the house of Cadmus Peverell. The house where he had turned the Resurrection Stone thrice over in his palm, the house where he had called upon his dead lover.

The house where he had hanged himself in his grief. Where Death had taken the second brother.

The balcony was painted a burnished orange as Albus made his way to the rickety railing, fingers lingering every moment upon the Elder Wand, assuring himself of its presence. There was no stench of death in this house, nothing to indicate it was anything but a glorified tourist spot in a backwater village starved for visitors. And yet, the shadows of this house seemed to chase him. Looming, as though they would snatch the wand away when he wasn’t looking.

It had been five years since he abandoned his hunt for the Hallows, but it wasn’t the first time since that Albus had found himself wandering down lanes paved with their traces.

It was only to discover whether the state of the Elder Wand was echoed in its brother Hallows. For once, his search was not a consequence of his youthful obsession.

Some wizarding genealogies were harder to trace than others. Peverell blood was mingled among many wizarding lines, but few would have inherited the Hallows or the unique power associated with the three brothers. That the Potters possessed the Cloak of Invisibility was a secret Albus had glimpsed long after its significance had faded from the heirs’ memories.

Somewhere out there, then, were descendants of Cadmus Peverell. Someone who held the Resurrection Stone, perhaps similarly unaware of its origin, who paraded a Hallow without its signature magic.

But there was no easy path to discerning who it was…

A breeze sifted through the folds of Albus’ cloak, and the balcony creaked under his weight.

For the millionth time that day, he considered visiting the Potters. The Invisibility Cloak was far easier to reach, and Fleamont wouldn’t deny him an invitation to his home.

Would he?

There was a Potter who was not quite a Potter haunting the back alleys of Diagon. A young man whose briefest touch sent the Elder Wand into a flurry of vitality. Who seemed to hold a thrall over a Hallow which had never, in the last five years, left Albus’ side.

Who had the barest hint of Fleamont in his face, yet claimed to bear no relation to the Potters. He could have been lying–

No. The Potters would never conspire to unite the Hallows. The Potters had always been, without a doubt, a good wizarding family in their own right – quiet and unassuming, rising to riches through talent and hard work, rather than the pedestal of inherited wealth.

But the stranger from Diagon Alley was as much an aberration in that neat little picture as the Hallows were in the mortal world. And Albus found himself shoving aside the idea of visiting his former students, delaying it yet another day.

Besides, he already knew where the Invisibility Cloak was. It would hardly take him more than a day to check on it. The Resurrection Stone, however, was a mystery, and if he could spend these moments investigating its loss to time and inheritance, he would do so without complaint.

His hand closed around the Elder Wand for the millionth time that day.

If he tightened his grip and closed his eyes, he could imagine yesterday again. That spike of power, unexpected and deep, magma exploding over his skin. Magic as potent as the silvery memories bottled away on the shelf above his Pensieve.

Albus opened his eyes to the death of sun-gold into a painted sky of twilight blue.

The meagre hum of power beat unhappily against his fingers.

* * *

A vivid glimmer of green caught his eye, and Tom looked up from his ledgers.

The man who called himself Harry stood outside the windowfront to Borgin and Burkes, satchel dangling from one shoulder. Like an absurdity tossed against the grimy shopfronts and grey cobblestones of Knockturn Alley.

Well, he _was_ an absurdity. It was only Tom’s third time laying eyes on him, but the slight hints of his strange presence shone as bright as the glint of sunlight on Harry's glasses.

His robes were nondescript, his cloak threadbare. Faded enough to be commonplace, yet not enough to dull and fray. His movements, however, were brisk, agitated, and they allowed a glimpse underneath the utterly uninteresting wizarding attire.

Muggle shirt, muggle trousers. Strange tatty pumps with a torn-off shoelace. His glasses were undoubtedly muggle too – cheap metal and wire, with lenses that glistened under years of shoddy charms and spell work.

And that was to say nothing of Harry’s hair – windswept on a day as calm and breezeless as this. Wild to the point of rebellion.

It was hard to say if he was trying to blend into the world of Knockturn Alley or the world of the muggles it so despised. Or if he was attempting to disguise himself at all.

With the hunch of his shoulders and the litheness of his frame, it would seem he did have a trace of an interest in passing unnoticed. In taking up as little space as possible. It was an oddly familiar stance, but it slipped past teasingly when Tom tried to grasp it.

The simplest answer would be _undercover auror_. Though Tom had never stumbled upon one himself, he knew there was no dearth of those in Knockturn Alley.

And an auror, Harry certainly was. He slipped too easily into defensive stances, had too tight of a grip on his wand – and he had showed up in Borgin and Burkes in _auror robes_ , that first day. Even if that hadn’t been all it took to convince Tom, the taste of Harry’s magic in that ancient bookstore had been _damning_.

Magical sensitivity and manipulation, the foundation of wandless magic, was not an unremarkable skill among wizards. Harry had appeared the moment Tom had loosened the restraints on his magic, had retaliated with a lash of raw power against Tom’s gentle, brushing prods. A finesse of magic seldom unleashed by shop clerks in bookstores.

It spoke of practice, of experience, of instinct. It spoke of an exceptionally disciplined mind, like Tom’s… or of the systematic training undergone by duellists, protégés of Defence masteries, and aurors.

Undercover auror was an easy conclusion to arrive at, but it was hard to believe someone so formidably powerful and competent at wielding magic was an absolute disaster at deflecting attention. The auror part was true, yes, but perhaps the undercover part was not…

But then why would Harry feel the need to conceal his true profession? Or the fact that he knew Riddle, had heard of him, had _recognized_ him at first sight?

He walked with all the poise of a mess of contradictions.

An absurdity. And a liar.

Tom touched a hand to the open ledgers to ensure the ink had dried, before folding them shut and resting an open palm on the covers. His eyes never strayed from the figure on the other side of the door.

Harry had to know he was visible to those inside the shop, but he seemed not to care what a sight he made. Dithering on the doorstep, one hand clutching the strap of his satchel, the other tapping a restless beat against the folds of his cloak.

There was no exact instant in which he seemed to settle upon a decision. Just a breath of a moment, and then he was half-turned away from the door. As if on the precipice of leaving.

Unacceptable.

Taking subtle aim with his wand, Tom twisted his wrist in a delicate pattern and let a thread of compulsion weave itself through the air between them. He willed it to sink through Harry’s skin, through his skull, into the depths of his mind.

He felt the exact moment his spell brushed against Harry–

And shattered.

Tom blinked. The sound of the bell jarred through the silence of the shop.

“What the _fuck_ , Riddle.”

And there it was, the inexplicable urge to grin. Tom straightened from where his elbows had leant themselves upon the countertop, and threw a rehearsed smile in Harry’s direction. “Welcome to Borgin and Burkes, how may I be of service?”

The words slipped past his lips like familiar but acrid water. Five years of the same smile, the endless echo of his words, spinning between him and his clientele like a broken, splintering record. The visitors of Borgin and Burkes seemed to enjoy the sheen of false, hollow melodies. They traded in blushes and handshakes, in nods and conspiratorial smirks.

But Harry’s face had twisted into a scowl the moment Tom opened his mouth.

“Oh, so we’re pretending you didn’t just try to _imperio_ me, are we?”

“I don’t see the need for pretence,” Tom demurred, pressing a palm to his chest. The warmth of his heartbeat was steady beneath his robe, if a touch too quick in its rhythm. “I didn’t try to _imperio_ you; I would never use an Unforgivable so casually.”

It was only a partial lie, yet if anything, Harry’s scowl deepened, harsh and cutting over the lines of face. A scoff escaped his lips, almost involuntarily.

“Whatever,” Harry hissed, and slammed his satchel down on the countertop.

Tom hastened to move the ledgers out of the way, sliding them to the side where they could be protected from this unexpected attack.

Two hours of entering meticulous letters and numbers, and Harry seemed to have no compunction about wrinkling the crisp, fragile parchment. He practically tore open the satchel, flipping it upside down until sheaves of vellum enclosed by thick purple tumbled out.

“I brought your fucking book.” The words were flung out like sharp-edged pebbles. “You’re welcome.”

Tom’s fingers were dainty as they pressed against the loose sheaves, against the white gold lining the cover. “Did your employer really hire you with a work ethic like that?”

 _Arcana of the Mystic East_ , declared the embossed title. It was on the verge of falling apart.

“Then again, I suppose,” he went on, unconsciously straightening the pages, prodding the edges together, “as a squib, she wouldn’t have much choice.”

The tip of a wand pressed against his throat.

Tom stilled.

“You will never speak of Nerissa,” Harry said in a low voice, “with anything other than respect.”

It had been far too long since someone had raised a wand against him.

And for a _squib_. There was nothing especially charming about Nerissa Ombre or her little bookstore. Not that Tom had known her for long, but what he had seen was rudeness and insult from someone so obviously weak, someone who couldn’t afford to make enemies.

It was rather curious how a squib was so audaciously working in the heart of Knockturn Alley. The Ombres had been an old family – Tom had a vague memory of coming across their bloodlines in the genealogy books he had devoured in his early years at Hogwarts. An old family, fallen to the wayside and untraceable in its recent generations.

There had been some details about the family itself, but they escaped Tom now. Some odd little things. But he could always look into them later.

Tom’s eyes flickered briefly to the thin length of wood digging under his chin.

Smooth, dark, worn into its owner’s hold. Holly.

“Borgin and Burkes is a terrible place to hold a duel,” Tom spoke casually, the wand tip serrating against his throat with every syllable. “I’m obligated not to tell you about the rather violent wards coating every inch of the walls, and that is not even considering the cursed artefacts in every corner. You must already be aware of that.”

 _As an auror_ , he left unsaid.

It would be almost disappointing if Harry conceded his point. There was something tantalizing about the glare which scorched into Tom’s face, like sunlight through a magnifier. Something that spoke of power and pride rather than foolishness and folly.

Or something that spoke of both.

Tom’s own fingers, still lingering on his yew wand, stiffened around the handle and slid it surreptitiously forward on the countertop.

Power and pride, or foolishness and folly.

In the next moment, the wand at his jugular vanished.

“Five thousand galleons without restoration, ten thousand with.” Where raw emotion had perforated the words before, the abrupt blankness of Harry’s voice, the monotone of his statement, was _startling._ “Take it or leave it.”

How does one leak vehemence like a broken sieve one moment, then fold it away so neatly the next? How does one hide the fire of a quick temper behind an ice-sheet shroud?

How does one glide in and out of rage, as if it were a doorway between life and death?

“Five thousand is too much.” Tom’s gaze followed the motion of Harry’s wand as it disappeared up his sleeve, tucked into some concealed holster. “I hope you realize I won’t be the one paying the amount – that honour goes to our client. If your price is driven by your personal vendetta–”

Harry barked a laugh, a strangled, choking sound scraped through his lips. “I don’t have any vendetta against you.”

“Naturally.” What an interesting way to phrase it, the use of _I_ instead of _we_. “But you’d rather my client pay ten times the value of the book? For some hasty comments I made, and later apologized for?”

Some of the tautness seeped out of Harry’s frame. Tom held back the urge to say another word – the silence would make Harry waver, would chip away at the stubborn jut of his chin.

The first few years Tom had worked at Borgin and Burkes, he had hardly stepped out of the shop from morning to evening. Cursed artefacts lurked in every corner, and it was his job to memorize the placement of each, their peculiar quirks and defences against magic, the ones which drained power and the ones which rebounded spells. Two years sifted agonizingly by, his memory saturated with the tale behind the opal necklace, the history of the moonstones stolen from a pack of werewolves, the gory truth behind the pretty green veil of lace which hung from a shapeless bust.

Two years, of ceaseless talking and smiling and worming his way into the grace of the store’s many pureblood patrons. The gloom had bleached the sun from his skin, leaving his face pale as a bone, like the yew of his wand.

Until finally, Burke had settled beady eyes upon the ease with which his customers spoke to the fresh-faced Hogwarts graduate, and sent Tom out to their homes of luxury to persuade them to part with their treasures.

Whether that treasure be mounds of galleons, or ruby-encrusted heirlooms, or artefacts locked away in their private collections.

His network of clients, of the wealthy and the influential, was by no means meagre. Tom’s reputation amongst them was immaculate, and would remain so.

Pettiness be damned.

“This isn’t about your client,” Harry spoke at length. “You may not be the one paying for it, but we both know how much you pride yourself on your impeccable _work ethic_.”

Tom tutted. “You seem quite inflexible in your opinion of me.” And was that not truly a pity? “I admit we started off on the wrong foot. Is there nothing I can do to remedy that?”

“Are you buying the book or not?” Harry bit out. His hand splayed over the purple cover, the other white-knuckled from gripping the edge of the counter.

Tom shook his head. “Lower the price. One thousand without restoration, two thousand with.”

He _could_ convince Rosamund Dreer of a price far above expectation, but Burke would want a profit. And a hefty one, if the numbers tossed about here held any clue of the book’s ultimate value.

Harry’s lips were pursed, little more than a thin white line. “Two thousand without. Three thousand with. Final offer, Riddle.”

It was _gross_ exploitation. It was almost Slytherin in its vindictiveness, yet so very Gryffindor in its tenacity.

But Tom couldn’t remember ever encountering Harry at Hogwarts. He would remember a boy like that, with the brown of his skin, the untamed head of hair, the striking green of his eyes, sheltered behind glasses too big for his face. He would remember the odd, jagged scar that peeked out from Harry’s fringe, and the constant attempts of his restless hands to flatten said fringe into submission.

He had remembered them, after all, from the first moment he laid eyes on Harry. He had needed them, had spelled them out to his followers in nit-picked detail.

No search was ever complete without a description of what was lost.

“Very well.” Tom suppressed a sigh. It was nowhere close to ideal, but it was obvious Harry would not budge, not with the way he was already inching the book back towards his satchel. “I’ll relay your charges to my client.”

Harry drew the flap shut on the loose vellum sheaves before swinging the satchel back onto his shoulder. “Fantastic. You have to give us your answer within the week.”

He turned without another word, hard enough to bump his hip against the counter, yet there was barely a falter in his step.

Tom watched the billow of his robes with every step Harry took towards the door.

A week, Abraxas and Edward had spent, hunting for clues were none existed. _Like chasing an apparition._

And though Tom had found him now, though he knew where to find Harry again, there was something to be said for doorways. Harry could walk out, and never return. Harry could walk out, and slip through the cracks of Knockturn Alley again. Harry could walk out, and perhaps the quaint little bookstore run by a squib where he had apparently hidden himself would vanish. A hallucination to a deranged mind, a mirage to someone parched for a _puzzle_.

And yet, there was nothing to be done, was there? Tom would have to be blind to miss the deep-seated distrust, the almost unreasonable hatred which trickled through every glance and every word Harry cast towards him.

Compulsion charms had fractured against that unwillingness to stay.

With his fingers curled around the handle to the door, Harry stopped.

Like a mirror to his arrival, he seemed to be dithering, _considering_ , and though Tom could make out a faint reflection in the glass of the door, he couldn’t trace Harry’s expression within it. He could merely stare, refusing to hold his breath, and wait with his hands resting, deceptively light, against the counter.

A few moments ticked by in silence, in utter stillness, before Harry seemed to tremble slightly.

He shook his head, and turned back.

“Look, Riddle,” he began. Paused. Shook his head again. “Where do you live?”

Whatever Tom had been expecting, that was certainly not it. “Why do you ask?”

If Harry had been fishing for information about Tom’s home address, surely there were more clandestine methods of knowing.

Not that he would be successful. Few people were privy to this particular shred of information about Tom. Not even his inner circle could boast of the knowledge.

Harry’s fingers slipped from the door handle, and Tom straightened once more, one hand brushing away the wrinkles in his robe.

His gaze stayed riveted to Harry, but Harry did not approach the counter again.

He seemed far more interested in the shelves crowding Borgin and Burkes. It was reminiscent of that first encounter – that insatiable curiosity, eyes roving indiscriminately over rusted coins and polished jewels. As though snapping mental photographs, an itch away from giving in to the urge to reach out and _touch_.

“I’m looking for a… an apartment,” said Harry, hands curled into loose fists at his sides. “Somewhere cheap. Nerissa said there were places around Knockturn Alley, but I’m not…”

“You need my help.” It was the _perfect_ slice of irony. “To look for a place to stay?”

An almost _fated_ excuse to bind Harry close… at least until the novelty of a newcomer to Knockturn wore off.

Harry nodded jerkily, moving further into the shadows of the shop, slinking along cramped rows and corners. “Somewhere close. I thought you’d know the streets. Or whatever.”

Tom hummed. “I do live close by.” He tipped his head back and gazed at the ceiling, raising a finger to tap against his chin. “What do I get in return?”

“I thought you wanted to make amends, didn’t you?” The voice came sniping out of the darkness. “Or was that all just another load of bollocks?”

“Why do you always think the worst of me?”

Harry really swore an awful lot. Tom could probably ascertain his parentage, given time, but pureblood upbringing seemed less and less likely with each sentence he spoke. Especially with the strange quirks of speech he casually revealed sometimes.

There was much to be ascertained, and too little time.

Tom followed Harry’s voice into the corners of the store, weaving in and out of the shelves until a mess of black curls slipped into his view.

“We’ve known each other five minutes,” Harry griped, from where he was crouched in front of a display of rare snake venoms. “Too early to establish patterns. Just tell me if you’ll help me out.”

“I’ll help you.”

Tom had intended to acquiesce the moment Harry had turned away from the door, of course, but no need to divulge that.

“I do wish to make amends, whatever you might think of me. But I would appreciate it if you joined me for a… small get-together, sometime soon, with certain acquaintances of mine.” He stopped when Harry stood stiffly from his crouch and moved to another shelf in the corner. “As a gesture of good faith.”

“Denied.”

Tom released a hiss of a breath, resisting the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Why not?”

“I’m not a very social person.”

 _Too little time_ , and too many barriers to cracking him open. The first of them being the man himself.

Harry turned towards a corner shelf, and came to a standstill.

His head canted to the side, and though Tom couldn’t see his face, he could tell Harry was no longer focused on their trailed-off conversation. As though Harry had sidled off to a separate world, on a search for his own lost artefacts.

Whatever was on that shelf had him utterly transfixed.

If Harry had accidentally been cursed… Well, there was a lot Tom knew of life debts. “It’s not a very large gathering.”

He stalked closer, hovering over Harry’s shoulder, leaning forward to peek at the cursed artefact which had its home on that shelf.

The nook Harry was staring into, however, was empty.

A rich coating of dust adorned its surface, undisturbed as it had been for months. Its last artefact had been a wooden carving of a lotus – relatively harmless, but it had once served as a divinatory tool for Cassandra Trelawney. Or so the records said.

And Harry was gazing into the dusty shelf as though it held the answers to existence itself.

Tom pursed his lips and flicked a glance down at Harry, who had hardly twitched at their closeness, at the warmth of the body next to his. “Everything on that shelf is safe to touch,” Tom enunciated slowly, and watched for a morsel of a reaction.

Harry did little more than blink, once, and then not at all. “There’s nothing on that shelf.”

_Yes, but do you know that?_

Tom swallowed down the question. It tasted like blood on his tongue. This was downright _appalling_.

He was on the brink of grabbing Harry’s jaw and forcefully pulling his gaze back towards him instead of literal _nothingness_ , but…

If he leaned just a tad closer, tilted his head a touch to the side, he could glimpse at the unfiltered emotions flitting across Harry’s face. The dreaminess of his eyes, the light parting of his lips. The shelf itself was hollow, but its effect on Harry was very much… not.

The thrall he stood under, lost to his fantasies and memories, was as real as the carpet of dust before them.

“Harry?” There was tentativeness in the way he spoke the name, and Tom wanted to reel it back in just for that. It was barely a whisper, a hiss of a sound, and it clearly didn’t shatter through the mesmeric state Harry was in at all.

Tom never would have guessed the way empty spaces could be doorways. Stealing away lost objects, never to return.

He uncurled a fist, drew it out of his pocket, and after a brief hesitance, shoved lightly at Harry’s shoulder.

A gasp slipped past Harry’s lips, and a shudder wracked his thin body. In an instant, he was speaking.

“How long do you–” He stopped, drew a breath, and started again. “Do you usually have some idea of the stuff you’re going to buy in the future? Some idea of how to get them?”

The query snapped like a rubber band, zinging out of the blue. Why would _this_ , out of everything, fascinate Harry all of a sudden?

“Sometimes,” answered Tom, because there was nothing else to possibly say. “We might get to know of something months before we finish acquiring it, so yes.”

The answer did not seem to please Harry. His shoulders slumped, and he had yet to look away from the empty shelf.

“It was a long shot anyway.” With those cryptic words, Harry finally took a step away from the shelf.

A flinch went through his body when his back collided against Tom’s chest.

Harry stumbled. His hand shot out to the shelves beside them, just as Tom caught his shoulders with a press of his palms.

Harry’s flailing fingers, however, bumped an artefact of spun-glass. A spinning top of sea-green translucence.

A sneakoscope.

Wild shrieks rent the air at once as the sneakoscope jolted into motion. It twisted maniacally in place, and the blooming darkness within was impossible to miss.

It was as though someone had packed Tom’s veins with ice. Frozen him for a fraction of a second before leaving him at the bottom of the world, a bloodless entity with a beating heart.

Then the world spun back into motion, as rapid as the sneakoscope.

Tom took several steps away from Harry, who fell away from the shelves instantaneously.

From the murkiness of its shelf, the cacophony resounded. The sneakoscope continued to whirl, blackness overtaking its clear interior.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Harry cursed, loudly, and Tom’s attention snapped to him at once. “Was that cursed or something?”

Was the clamour a mirror of his thoughts, chaotic and wild and rushing forth at once, or was it just the dance of the sneakoscope? The artefact wasn’t cursed on its own, no, but to question whether it was dangerous…

He couldn’t say. Just as he couldn’t say whether Harry was just an eccentricity or a threat.

“It is safe to touch,” Tom reassured, his words detached to his own ears. “It won’t kill you.”

Harry staggered to his feet and slipped his wand into his hand. “ _Silencio_!”

Abruptly, a shroud of silence descended. The racket dissipated into magical quietude, even as the sneakoscope darkened with every rotation.

There was only so much magic could quieten, however. It couldn’t quieten raw, unfettered hunger. It couldn’t quieten that pulsating, exacerbating need to dig his fingers into Harry’s temples, into the silvery line of his faded scar, into the white of his skull, and crack it open.

Just for a glimpse underneath.

Because the sneakoscope may not be cursed, but it was _confirmation_.

“That’s a normal sneakoscope?”

Harry’s grip on the strap of his satchel was tight enough to rip. His voice was feeble compared to before.

“Yes,” Tom lied.

“So.” Harry tugged at his rumpled robes as he looked at Tom. “About that apartment thing…”

“I’ll meet you after your work hours are over, today,” said Tom, rubbing a thumb against the warm stone of the Gaunt ring, pushing against its heated edges until dull pain blossomed along his nerves.

Familiar, grounding pain. Nothing like the impulses contorting through his hands, through his fingers.

“Great.” Harry blew out a rush of air from his lips, walking backwards to the front of the shop. “Great, so if that’s settled…”

“And on Saturday evening, I will take you to Tanglewood,” Tom continued. He followed at a leisurely prowl, hands in his pockets, because there was nothing to _fear_ now, was there? “There’s a farewell dinner, for someone I knew from school.”

This wasn’t a puzzle he was going to lose to the slippery streets of the world. It was as he had thought – there had to be fate designing this game for him to play, orchestrating the clues and the prizes and the map for him to walk on.

“No.” Harry glared and made to turn away. “Nope, not doing gestures of good faith. A sneakoscope went off here, and I’m pretty sure I know who the untrustworthy one in the room is, Riddle.”

Tom could have _laughed_. Two years spent committing to memory the peculiarities of each artefact in Borgin and Burkes. He could have rattled off each fact about the sneakoscope, could have watched the blood drain from Harry’s face and _delighted_ in it.

But instead, he said, “It is but a small gathering, Harry. I’m sure Alphard would like to meet such an interesting character as yourself before he leaves Britain.”

It wasn’t a lie. It would be prudent to introduce Harry, defender of squibs, to someone he could resonate with, and Alphard, defender of muggles, was the best choice. Tom hadn’t thought he would come across a scenario where he would actively seek out Alphard’s company, and yet.

“Alphard?” Harry was not immediately vociferating his refusal. Good.

“Alphard Black,” Tom said. “He’s leaving for Mongolia next week. I know you feel as though you might not assimilate, since you do not know anyone, but my associates can be very accommodating.” And if not, they could be persuaded. “I think it would do you good to be introduced to people of a standing on par with the Blacks.”

He tilted his head curiously. “You have heard of the Blacks?”

Harry nodded. “Of course. Yeah. I – All right, fine. I’ll come to your stupid fancy party.”

That was rather quick. But it was also inevitable.

“…Wonderful,” he said slowly. “I’ll see you in the evening.”

Harry seemed uncertain whether he should respond, or just leave, and he stood for a second, eyes darting about nervously, a faint tinge of red on his cheeks. In the end, he settled for a hastily blurted, “Bye!” before rushing out of the shop and disappearing down the cobbled streets.

Tom watched the space where he had stood for several seconds, the dust motes dancing in the shaft of sunlight, golden and barely visible.

The sneakoscope whirled still, at the edge of his vision from where he was stood. Half in the light of the storefront, half in the darkness of the dusty shelves.

Hands in his pockets, he walked closer to the sneakoscope with cautious steps, bending to watch the blur of teal and black in the shadowed recesses of the shelf.

Pointing his wand at the artefact, he murmured a charm to wipe Harry’s magical signature clean off of the spun-glass surface.

It twisted to an instant halt, standing stationary and clear once more, devoid of its darkness. Sea-green curves reflected what slivers of light they could.

Untainted.

He could not sell a tainted artefact, after all. The sneakoscope would activate again on touch, absorbing the magical signature of its victim, but for now, it must remain another fresh product at Borgin and Burkes.

“You finished with the numbers, Tom?”

“Yes.” Tom straightened, turning away from the shelf to follow the hunched-over figure of Caractacus Burke. Burke had entered the front of the shop noiselessly, as he was wont to do.

“What are you doing, lounging about?” Burke’s mouth twisted sourly as he glanced about the shop. “Did any customers come in?”

Tom shrugged, and chose to ignore the questions. Burke wasn’t hunting for answers, really – he was just there to sniff about, the owner of the shop scuttling through his territory as a reminder.

Besides, Tom had something to verify, and what an opportune moment Burke had chosen to walk in on.

“I was inspecting the Truth-Telling Sneakoscope, here.” Tom gestured with a nod of his head to the artefact in question. “It seems a few details have slipped my mind, and I needed them confirmed. In case any potential buyers need to have it explained to them, of course.”

He waited until Burke gave a cautious nod, then continued, “I recall you telling me it activates on touch, and memorizes the magical signature until magically cleansed of it.” With a careful pause, he rolled his eyes to the ceiling, as though struggling to remember. “It spins if the person in question has several secrets to hide. And the darker it turns, the deeper the person wishes to bury these secrets. The more forbidden is their revelation.”

Pinching his lips, he turned back to Burke. “Am I missing something? I feel that I am.”

Burke huffed, a low grumble in his throat. “Most of it is there. But it doesn’t spin if you got secrets. Everyone’s got secrets.”

He scratched his jaw and narrowed his gaze suspiciously at Tom. “It spins if it is in the same room as who you most want to keep these secrets from.”

And there it was, an echo of what Tom already knew. He couldn’t have been wrong, of course, but to hear it from the man who procured the artefact was gratifying in a way his memory couldn’t be.

When Tom had first heard of the sneakoscope, he had doubted it would ever make it off the shelves. It was of little use to most witches and wizards.

But Tom had never been most witches and wizards.

“So,” he clarified slowly, “it could go your whole life without spinning, but… if you’ve touched it, and it’s in the presence of, essentially, whoever is the largest threat to your secrets – that’s when it spins.”

Burke nodded again. “That’s about right.”

If he pressed his palm to his chest now, Tom doubted he would feel a heartbeat at all. It felt aflutter somewhere in the back of his throat, vanished from its steady cage in his chest.

Turning away from Burke, he let his eyes alight once more on the frozen sneakoscope.

“Yes,” he said, and his fingers tapped a restless rhythm on the bone-white surface of his wand. “Yes, I thought I was correct.”


	5. Quietude

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this chapter is late. It's not that I haven't been working on the fic, it's just that most of the work has been planning rather than actual writing.
> 
> Also, I've really just been quite hampered.
> 
> Anyhow, it's late so the editing was a bit hasty. If there are typos, I apologize; let me know, and I'll fix them.

The tips of his fingers were numb as Harry stepped away from the glass of Nerissa’s door.

The first stars were sweeping across the gold-edged darkness of the sky, and the chill of the evening breeze was palpable. Too many minutes had passed since Nerissa had told him to go home, but Harry – Harry had cocooned himself amidst the books until his hands were coated in their musty scent.

All to avoid the presence behind him.

“Quite late, isn’t it?” said Riddle.

Harry could hear nothing in his voice.

Not amusement or fury or disdain. Nothing of the emotions Riddle had so meticulously picked and displayed to him in Borgin and Burkes, earlier that day.

It shouldn’t have jarred him, as the summer chill did, and yet–

“I got held up,” Harry told the door, to the blurry shades of his reflection, black and green and gold. “Besides, how was I supposed to know you get off work before I do? It’s not like you came in looking for me.”

He swivelled away from Nerissa’s store.

A pebble skittered away into the darkness of Knockturn Alley.

Leant against the popcorn wall opposite, Riddle appeared to be a phantom – pale, garbed in black, dark hair neat and coiffed and _incongruous_ against the broken boards and shutters of the shopfronts. Shadows of awnings fell upon him, until his eyes were impossible to discern.

“I thought you might not appreciate it if I did that,” he spoke, and even his voice was low enough to have emanated out of nowhere. Not a stir of fabric or a scuff of shoes reached Harry’s ears.

It was inhuman, to stand that still.

How was he supposed to reply to that? Riddle spoke the truth, and a rather obvious one.

Harry pursed his lips as yet another breeze wove its way through the narrow street. His hands curled into his sleeves as he drew his robe tighter about himself.

Quietude surrounded them like a shroud.

It had seemed like a good idea when he had asked Riddle about the homes hidden away in Knockturn Alley. A _logical_ idea, and Harry had precious few of those.

He knew no one in this time, save for Nerissa. And Nerissa had never stepped out of the shop, as far as Harry could remember; she had hardly ever stepped out to the front to greet customers. Harry wouldn’t subject her to whatever the inner streets of Knockturn held – and it could be nothing good.

Riddle, on the other hand, must be as familiar with this district as the palm of his own hand. And though he was far from Harry’s first choice, there _was_ a reason to prod into Riddle’s life, to see what he could find out.

Somewhere among these crisscrossing cobblestones was likely Riddle’s own home. And the diary had to be there, right?

The reasons had spun clear as diamonds in Harry’s head earlier. But now, under the icy skies, faced with the wordless, impeccable mask of Tom Riddle, they slipped through his grasp like dust in the wind.

“We’ll have to walk further into Knockturn Alley,” Riddle spoke eventually. His words melded into the sounds of the twilit street – the scurrying of tiny feet between the walls, the rhythmic thud of a knife against a chopping block. “I know a few locales which might suit you.”

Harry nodded, sliding a hand into his pocket where he could clasp the worn handle of his wand. He waited until Riddle had pushed off the wall before treading to follow him.

But before he could take a mere step upon the pavement, Riddle’s hand darted back and firmly curled around Harry’s arm.

“Stay close,” Riddle murmured, “you’re a newcomer here.”

And with that, he tugged Harry forward, who was forced to fall into step beside him.

Harry immediately pulled away from his grip, his knuckles bloodless around his wand. Riddle had a point, but–

“You could have given me a warning,” Harry muttered, rolling his shoulder in discomfort.

Though Riddle had let go without protest, he hardly seemed to register the words. His gaze lingered on the more shadowy corners of the streets before them, and swept past the loiterers huddled in doorways. Still, he walked close to Harry, and that was probably deliberate – Riddle’s arm brushing against his, the dull echo of their footsteps rising to fill the silence.

The lanes dissecting through Knockturn Alley were almost serpentine, but it wouldn’t be the first intricate map Harry memorized in his life. He could remember the yellowed signboard which marked the entrance to a run-down, doxy-infested building. The feeble magical lights around a tavern with too many amber-eyed patrons. The broken statue of a hag, too realistic in its detail, which led to a fresh unfurling of streets like spokes on a wheel.

There weren’t many witches and wizards still out and about, but there were enough. As Riddle and Harry slipped through an alleyway and out into a wide, fluorescence-lit road, a pair of wizards turned to watch them pass.

How many of them knew Riddle? Not everyone could be acquainted with him, of course, but he had to be a familiar face around these parts…

“Where have you been living until now?”

The question was like the clang of a bell in his ear, unexpected enough to shatter the tranquillity. Harry glanced at Riddle out of the corner of his eye, crossing his arms and gritting his teeth as another burst of frigid wind twisted over the lane.

There was something undeniably _wrong_ here. Riddle was not the sort to chase after small talk.

Harry watched the way their steps matched one another’s, shoes over cobblestone, through streetlights and shadows. “Are we going to talk about the weather next?”

“We could, if you’d like,” said Riddle, and when Harry glanced at him this time, it was to find Riddle’s gaze fastened to his own. The crisp flavour of bemusement underlay the dark of his eyes.

A soft glimmer to his sharp edges.

Harry released a breath, slow, and somewhat reluctant. Despite being the middle of summer, it was almost visible as a foggy cloud.

“It’s freezing,” he offered intelligently. “Don’t you think?”

Riddle’s lips curled to flash him a languid grin. “It always is.”

“What about during winter? Does it get warm here then?” A laugh bubbled up in Harry’s chest, but he batted it down with a purse of his lips.

A beat of silence fell between them, stretching to a moment, then a minute. Had he said something wrong? Who knew, perhaps Knockturn Alley was buried under a snowdrift in winter, and everyone was forced to hibernate–

“As fascinating as it is to talk about the weather,” said Riddle, and Harry blinked away visions of snowmen piled up against the pavements, “it is bound to bore us eventually, don’t you think? I’d much rather hear more about you.”

Harry felt his shoulders creep up, hunching in on themselves.

Oh. So that’s what it was all about.

An interrogation. Needling more than piercing, subtle and harmless… but an interrogation nonetheless.

What else could it be? This was Tom Riddle – a manipulator. A murderer.

A liar.

This was familiar ground, or at least, this should have been familiar ground. But the longer Harry spent in Riddle’s company – the stolen few words and the unintended clashes – the more he felt… wrong-footed.

From one interaction to another, Riddle slipped in and out of personas. Speaking dramatically one moment, and not at all the next. Polite and charismatic, and lost in a blood-red fury.

Before today, Harry had never met him outside the hours he worked as a shop clerk in Borgin and Burkes – except when Riddle was being a murderous Dark Lord in the future, and those times likely didn’t count.

He had never, in this era, met a Riddle unrestrained by whatever rules, whatever charisma, whatever conventions guided him.

Harry had once spent long hours awake, hours sacrificed to picking apart his thoughts and emotions from Voldemort’s, shielding them, dividing them, and yet falling into the crumbled recesses of the Dark Lord’s mind anyway. He had once known every nook and cranny of it, a map of Voldemort’s life superimposed on his own, predictable as a reflection.

What did he know of Tom Riddle, though? Beyond memories as unreliable as the words of their owners, what did he know of Voldemort before he spiralled into the man Harry had spent his life battling?

“Oh, the feeling is mutual, Riddle.” The smile Harry sent him was a strain, a tight pull at the edges of his lips. “Tell me, where do _you_ live?”

Riddle laughed.

It was a surprised, hastily cut-off sound, ringing clear into the deserted night. His hand found Harry’s wrist, wrapping cold around his pulse, and Harry wondered if Riddle could feel the way it beat frantically under his touch as he veered them down yet another tenebrous street.

When Riddle answered, it was as vague as Harry had expected him to be.

“Where I live is not where you want to live.”

There was so much to ask, so much to prod at. And no straight answers forthcoming. It was such a Slytherin way to do things, itching and burrowing under each other’s skin.

It was a fragile peace. Suspended between them, almost tangible, thick and yet butter-soft.

It was civility, in a way. Riddle hadn’t been too secretive of his interest in Harry, and Harry could never be secretive for long if he tried.

The Slytherin way could contain things, at the very least. Could contain the destructiveness that no doubt lingered at the edge of this road, at the end of their path, however they chose to end it.

Perhaps it would tide over for Riddle, just another fleeting, forgettable obsession. Perhaps it would end with him dead, with his horcruxes bleeding out inky-black next to him.

However it ended, there was a timeline to preserve. Harry had already bent the rules of time far beyond what should be possible, and he had no idea _what_ those rules were. One rule of thumb couldn’t go wrong, though – to contain his destructiveness as far as possible.

So yes, the Slytherin way was, possibly, the safer way.

Besides, if Riddle was so… _intense_ in his diplomacy–

What would he be like in his violence?

“And where do you think I want to live?” Harry asked, more to fill the quiet than anything, because the heavier the silence grew, the more it seemed to be on the verge of snapping. A dam of driftwood, about to come undone.

Riddle hummed, his face slipping into shadow as they passed under an awning. “I have a place in mind,” he said, quiet and drenched in finality.

The grip on Harry’s wrist lingered, digging into his bones.

They reached the end of the street without another word, with a terseness in their footsteps that Harry hadn’t noticed before. A fresh row of streetlamps stood waiting as if to greet them.

The lamps illumed a crossroads under their golden radiance.

Harry came to a halt, sweeping a gaze over the brick-buildings, the soft lights visible through tiny windows and the wrought-iron railings along tiny balconies. They stretched high against the starlit skies of Knockturn Alley.

It was quieter here, much quieter than the shopfront-riddled area. Each breath Harry drew in felt cleaner, less thickened with the pungency of dark magic.

Riddle had walked a couple of paces ahead, but he paused now, in the centre of the crossroads. The ghost of a smirk still danced on his lips as he pivoted to face Harry.

“Would you like to know the area before you choose?” asked Riddle, canting his head in a gesture encompassing the four roads around them. “Or would you like me to simply guide you to the homes I think most suitable?”

Harry was definitely not going to Riddle the next time he needed a flat.

“Well, I should at least get an introduction to the area,” he said, ignoring the way Riddle’s eyes bore into him, even from a distance. “I have to live here, after all.”

Riddle arched a brow, but amenably raised a hand to point to the street to their right. “Prendergast Dominion. It caters primarily to pureblood families hoping to hide the evidence of their illicit scandals and affairs.”

Harry craned his neck to get a glimpse into the street, where a tall white building was visible, a couple of silhouettes lurking and talking in low voices by the entrance.

“Expensive,” Riddle concluded, “but they have a reputation for discretion.”

Was this where Riddle lived?

It was unlikely. Riddle didn’t come from money, and Prendergast didn’t seem like the type of establishment to entertain permanent homes, anyway.

Even if it did have a name pretentious enough to attract someone like Riddle.

Harry squinted at where the building sprawled out of sight, further down the pavement. “Well, I’m clearly not part of their usual clientele.”

“Clearly not.” Riddle turned to the street behind him, and said, “That is where you’ll find Spectral Homes. Oldest in the area, which means they have their fair share of ghosts, poltergeists, and the occasional ghoul. They’re also the cheapest.”

“Not sure about the ghouls,” Harry admitted, as he recalled the attic ghoul who had pretended to be a bedridden Ron. “It must be like living with someone who has spattergroit.”

A chuckle slipped past Riddle’s lips, another hastily cut-off sound, and there was a slight furrow between his brows as he glanced at Harry. Finally, Riddle pointed to the street to their left.

It winded and dipped and meandered around corners. Brick and wood and cobblestone fading into the darkness.

“Yarrow Bush, and Leela’s,” Riddle informed, taking a step towards the street in question. Waiting, no doubt, for Harry to follow him.

But Harry’s eyes had frozen upon Riddle’s hand, where the moonlight caught the carved edges of the Resurrection Stone. The mark of the Deathly Hallows seemed to light up in response to his stare.

“The last two viable complexes in the area. Leela’s is the best for you, considering what I know of you so far.”

“Oh?”

Harry forced his gaze away from the stone, from the allure of its silvery-black gleam. Thankfully, it vanished out of sight as Riddle tucked his hand back into his pocket.

A moment too late, and Riddle would have caught note of Harry’s fixation on his ring. Not a Hallow to him, but a horcrux.

“And what do you know of me?” Harry questioned, pushing aside thoughts of horcruxes and Hallows.

A soft breeze stirred Riddle’s hair, and a single stray curl fell across his forehead as he answered. “You enjoy the company of those who have the company of no other.”

Somewhere, a radio began to blare the faint bass notes of Blodwyn Bludd.

There was a gravitas to the way Riddle spoke the words. A certainty, a calmness. As though he had known Harry for years, not met him a mere two weeks ago.

There was a flush on Harry’s cheeks, the warmth of it sharp against the arctic grasp of the night. There was so little he knew of Riddle, and yet…

And yet here Riddle was, his hand resting on Harry’s shoulder, steering him lightly into the street. If he hadn’t been, Harry might have faltered in his step, might have halted in place for far longer.

How much could one person know another, if the other didn’t know him at all?

“What about Yarrow Bush?” Harry remembered to ask, his eyes avoiding the curious glares emanating from the windows around them.

“Yarrow Bush isn’t for you, either,” Riddle stated. “If you want to form… connections, here in Knockturn Alley, then yes.” He glanced down at Harry. “However, I believe if you wished to procure some rare herbs or potions, you wouldn’t ask my aid in looking for a home.”

A home. That _was_ what Harry sought, wasn’t it? Not connections. Not some place that could let him return to the future. Not even tools that would help him destroy a horcrux.

Just a home, in the very heart of Knockturn Alley, fifty years in the past.

It was a laughable thought.

He clung to Riddle’s words, however, boxed them up and tucked them away. Because the way Riddle had described Yarrow Bush…

A wrought-iron fence came into view as, with a squeeze to Harry’s shoulder, Riddle brought him to a stop.

Leela’s home was a stretch of yellow brick and potted plants, curtained windows and a gentle stillness. Harry sidestepped a pair of gardening shears on the way to the front door, the gravel of the path crunching underfoot.

He slipped into place by Riddle’s side, just as Riddle slammed the eagle knocker twice against the door.

A shaft of pale, yellow light fell upon them.

Harry adjusted his glasses before blinking up at the silhouette in the doorway.

The woman towering over them was clad in a long, brown robe, which draped itself shapelessly over her skeletal frame. Her eyes, dark as the sky above their heads, glowered intensely from within their sockets.

Her skull-like face was framed by tresses of black, inky hair. They trailed down her shoulders, to her bare ankles, and brushed the hem of her garb.

Her skin had a distinct tinge of forest green to it.

“Mr Riddle,” she murmured, her eyes flicking over Harry once before turning back to his companion. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

The low, suppressed tenor of her voice – the submerged quality to her words, as though spoken underwater–

Harry’s hand was back in his pocket, fingers curled around his wand, moments before the meaning of the voice occurred to him.

Banshees were dark creatures.

And that wasn’t a terrible thing on its own, no – there was hardly any uniformity to dark creatures, in the past or the future. There was no reason to be alarmed.

But this was Knockturn Alley. This was a banshee, in the heart of Knockturn Alley, likely the owner of the home Harry was supposed to live in. This was a banshee he didn’t know, and–

This was Tom Riddle.

Tom Riddle, whose gaze he could sense, intent as it seared into the side of his face. Whose lips had to be twitching, suppressing a smile, a smirk, that flash of bemusement Harry had caught a glimpse of beneath his blank, unreadable mask.

No doubt he had noticed Harry stiffening beside him, had noticed the way his hand vanished out of sight. 

What was Riddle looking for? What did he see, when he looked at Harry?

Wariness? Fear?

Challenge?

Harry didn’t let go of his wand. Nor did he draw it.

Beside him, Riddle shifted his attention to the woman – the banshee – and it was as though a physical weight had dissipated.

“Leela,” he greeted, his smile shining through his voice, “my friend here is looking for a place to stay. I offered to guide him to your services, of course.”

Harry fought down a violent twitch at the mention of the word _friend_. First impressions were crucial; it wouldn’t do to break Riddle’s nose in front of Leela.

“Of course.” Leela finally looked at Harry, her void-black eyes impossible to elude. “I assume, then, you found him adequately suited to the kind of tenants I take on.”

“What kind of tenants do you take on?” asked Harry, before he could help himself.

And just like that, the weight of Riddle’s stare was back, quick and familiar, like it had never left.

It might have been smarter to stay silent. But Harry couldn’t stand it, the way Riddle talked about him, assessed him, as though he wasn’t even there.

“The quiet kind.” Leela’s voice strung her back into the conversation, reverberating against Harry’s ears.

Harry took comfort in the thrumming warmth of holly against his palm. _The quiet kind_ wasn’t really a measure he could confirm or deny his skill in.

But Leela’s gaze appeared to sharpen the longer she stared, although it was impossible to tell with her featureless eyes. She cast a surveying glance over Harry, over the faded robes and muggle clothes, resting briefly on the hand still concealed by his pocket.

“You’ll do fine,” she said eventually, and stepped aside.

Riddle glided in without pause, and Harry trailed after him.

The hallway was carpeted with lush brown fur, and the unusual decorative choice of peach wallpaper. Leela swept away to the first door, gesturing to the tacked-on brass number 1.

“Mine is this one,” she whispered, “if you need anything. Most of the third floor is empty, except thirty-three and thirty-seven. If you want a lower floor, thirteen is vacant, but most don’t take it.”

“Why not?” The staircase bannister was worn smooth under Harry’s palm.

Above him, halfway to the landing, Riddle looked back.

“Superstition,” he answered, in the same moment as Leela said, “I’ll tell you, sometime.”

A beat of silence fell between them. Vaguely, Harry was aware of Riddle disappearing towards the landing above.

The first stair creaked loudly as Harry stepped onto it.

He winced, and cast a glance at Leela, who was already shuffling off to her apartment.

“Rent is two sickles,” she told him, over her shoulder, before the door slammed shut behind her.

The hallway was left empty. Only Harry remained, with his foot on the first stair, and the flames in the wall sconces tossing lambent glows against the wallpaper.

He found Riddle on the first floor, leant against the bannister. No doubt Riddle thought Harry would be happy to take the thirteenth flat, but Harry continued upstairs, ignoring the surprised stare he could sense boring into his back.

The closer he was to the crisp skies, to the first breeze of morning and the endless white of the clouds, the better. Not that he was going to explain all that to Riddle.

“Do you have a preference for the flat number?” asked Riddle, as they alighted upon the topmost floor.

Harry shrugged in response, passing the rows of identical doors, his footsteps muffled by the carpet underneath. The wall sconces threw garish illumination over the corridor, warping his shadow into a mockery of his silhouette, and he found himself tracing its blackened edges as he came to a stop in front of flat 39.

The door was oak, nondescript as the others, at the very end of the corridor.

Harry tilted his head to the side as the dull brass number came into view. “How do we get in?”

“ _Alohomora._ ” Riddle’s voice grew closer with every syllable. Deeper, curving around his words with deliberate intent. “The wards are your own to design, once you move in.”

Harry drew his wand from his pocket, and cast the charm.

The door swung open on silent hinges. The room beyond was in utter darkness, only the faintest glimmer of stars peeking in from the window opposite.

The sconces within flared to life as Harry stepped over the threshold.

The flat was small, a studio apartment more than anything, with a kitchenette off to the side and an alcove hiding a door to what was presumably the bathroom.

Harry stood in the centre of the flat and pivoted in a slow circle, before coming to face Riddle. He was leant against the closed door, hands in the pockets of his trousers, one ankle crossed over the other.

A mirror to the way he had stood, when he had greeted Harry outside Nerissa’s shop today.

If _greeted_ was the right word.

For a moment, Harry was back in Nerissa’s bookshop. Ensconced by books on either side, breathing in their dust. Their pages crackling and warm against his fingertips. Nerissa’s voice somewhere behind him, telling him to close up the shop already.

Or perhaps even earlier, to the sunlit interior of Borgin and Burkes. Of the moment he had stepped away from the door, had approached Riddle with a favour, had intentionally let himself be led here.

The sneakoscope must have been like a seer’s crystal ball, hinting at his own future, whirling and darkening endlessly…

“Is it to your satisfaction?” Riddle asked, his voice once more slinking into a dulcet tenor.

Harry’s laugh rang hollow against his own ears. He was conscious of the weight of his wand, still held loosely between his fingers. “I haven’t even looked at it yet.”

They were hardly in a deserted side-street of Knockturn Alley anymore. There were others on this floor, in this building; there was a banshee who owned it – though perhaps that wasn’t a point in Harry’s favour, considering said banshee was an acquaintance of Riddle.

But Riddle wouldn’t try anything _now_ , would he?

If he had held on to his tact, his civility, all the way from Nerissa’s to this section of Knockturn; if he hadn’t led Harry astray, or attacked when he had the chance–

He wouldn’t do anything now.

Would he?

Riddle tipped his head forward in a nod, raising a brow expectantly at Harry.

And so, Harry turned away to complete his inspection of the flat.

The wallpaper was peeling, old and red, but easily fixed with a touch of magic. The bathroom had a functioning shower, and though grimy, it was nothing a cleaning charm couldn’t fix. The main room was empty, bare and uncarpeted, but it wasn’t like Harry had to make a home out of it immediately.

And the best of them all was the window, which opened onto a small balcony, simple to climb into. Above him, the stars were infinite, and below, the snaking twists and turns of Knockturn Alley spread out like an inviting, devious labyrinth, perforated with lights and shimmering under moonbeams.

It was, still, a little colder than he would have liked. A woodstove would warm the place up nicely, though. Nothing compared to the roaring fires of the Gryffindor common room, of course; those flames had never snuffed out, as far as Harry could remember. The memories were sepia-soaked, toasting his toes from underneath his blanket, sinking into the couches after Quidditch practice in winter…

“I think I could live here,” he murmured.

He looked at Riddle, met his gaze for a fleeting second–

The brush of Legilimency was swift and acrid.

It struck at Harry’s mind like a palpable thing, a current of electricity snapping against his thoughts.

Because, of _course_ , Riddle would try something now.

Harry’s wrist jerked into motion before he was aware of it. A stinging hex zipped off, wordless and instinctive, and he knew without looking it had struck at Riddle’ heart.

The attempt at Legilimency withdrew instantaneously, dispelling as though it had never been.

Harry didn’t lower his wand, didn’t shift it aside from where it was pointed at Riddle. “Are we doing this, then?” he breathed out.

But Riddle hadn’t moved from his position at all. Leant by the door, hands in his pockets, one ankle crossed over the other.

Not a hair had stirred, not a cloth rumpled. His gaze upon Harry was as steady as before, meeting his glare without hesitance or falter.

“Doing what?” Riddle asked evenly, and it would be so _easy_ to fire off a slicing hex along the same path as his earlier spell…

Harry swallowed back the coppery taste of blood on his tongue. His wand remained raised, and as an afterthought, he slammed his Occlumency barriers back in place.

“If you have questions,” he spoke, slow and deliberate, “it would be much easier to ask me, don’t you think?”

That spark of bemusement returned to Riddle’s eyes.

How could Harry have thought it soft before? It was a whirling, crimson-tinged current of – of _intensity_ so severe it bordered on mania, setting Riddle’s gaze alight in a strangely familiar way.

Riddle pushed off the door and stalked further into the room.

And Harry had to resist the urge to step back.

After all, there was nowhere to go. Just a window full of stars, and the cobblestones of Knockturn beneath.

“Of course,” Riddle agreed, “I could ask you. But your skill at deflecting questions is truly commendable.”

“It depends on the question, really,” said Harry, his wand falling to his side as Riddle closed the distance between them.

The tip of it never strayed from his direction, even as Riddle loomed closer, until Harry was forced to tilt his head back to meet his eyes.

“Why did you ask for my help?” asked Riddle.

Just a step closer, and Riddle would be pressed against him. Still, Harry refused to step back.

He blinked up at Riddle, searching his gaze. Hoping to catch another glimpse of that oddly familiar spark, until Harry could put his finger on it…

“What do you mean?”

Riddle huffed out a breath, and the warmth of it fanned across Harry’s cheeks. “Why did you ask for my help today? You clearly dislike me. You distrust my advice. You even distrust my acquaintances. It seems rather counterintuitive, does it not?”

“I don’t dislike you,” said Harry, and then, because it had tasted unconvincing even as it left the tip of his tongue: “I don’t really know anyone else in Knockturn.”

“I highly doubt you were quite that desperate.”

And there it was again – the glimmer of something in his gaze, like the sun shimmering through blackened waters. 

It was reminiscent of the diary.

Of the horcrux within, and the look he had worn in his eyes whenever he stared at Harry.

“I think,” said Riddle, and a smile uncoiled over his face, as though it had been lying in wait, “it is obvious that both you and I want something from each other, Harry. Something we’re willing to simply take away, should it come to that.”

This time, Harry did take a step back.

“There’s nothing you could possibly want from me,” he protested, heart beating somewhere in the back of his throat. “I’m the most boring person I know.”

Riddle’s smile didn’t diminish in the slightest. “For such a Gryffindor, you’re quite well-versed in lies.”

“I never went to Hogwarts,” said Harry immediately.

“No, you didn’t,” Riddle conceded, half-turning to the door. “I would have remembered you.”

And with that, he turned the doorknob, and slipped into the corridor outside.

Harry stood where he was for a moment, each breath a ragged pull against his throat, a struggle to inhale and exhale. The grip on his wand never loosened.

Any moment now, Riddle could come back in. He had never drawn his wand once tonight, but what if he did now?

Why wouldn’t he do it now? This was Tom Riddle.

This was the man who would be Voldemort.

The reminder was bitter and algid, rotted roots twisting about Harry’s bones. This was the man who would be Voldemort. Who had killed and would kill, who would tear at the seams of his soul until there was nothing left, who would be single-handedly responsible for every death and loss in Harry’s life–

And he was far too close to Harry, far too early.

There was no easy way to walk out of this game. This game that felt like–

Like being on the edge of a livewire. Sparking, twisting, _alive._ Like magic itself had been injected into his veins, like a craving he hadn’t even recognized had been sated.

The moments ticked by, and the door stayed closed.

Maybe this was a problem best handled up close. Maybe there was something Harry could _do_ if he simply… went along with it.

Something he could change.

With one last exhale, Harry pushed his wand back into its holster.

Riddle was waiting in the corridor outside. The wall sconces cast the planes of his face in shadow, in light, in the murky grey shades that lay in between.

“As a reassurance,” he said, as Harry closed the door to flat thirty-nine behind him, “there is really nothing concerning about Leela. She’s extremely protective of her tenants, and she only takes on those who are… outcasts, but uncontroversial. She won’t allow one to endanger the others by inviting trouble to her doorstep.”

_Well, then, I must be a spectacularly poor choice, considering I’ll probably bring you to her doorstep constantly._

Harry strode down the corridor ahead of him, and didn’t look back to see if Riddle followed. “You don’t need to convince me, Riddle. I said I’d take it, didn’t I?”

An answering hum reached his ears as Harry stepped onto the first landing.

“And I will see you this Saturday.”

The way Riddle spoke it was too firm to be a question. Harry decided to treat it as one anyway.

“Yes, you will,” he said in a mild tone. “I haven’t forgotten, don’t worry.”

Two could play this game.

Riddle might know where to find Harry at all times, but surely, he had given away more of himself tonight than he had intended.

_“If you want to form… connections, here in Knockturn Alley…”_

There was not a shadow of a doubt that Riddle lived in Yarrow Bush. It sounded exactly like the type of place Riddle would seek out, and something about the way he had spoken of it was tinged with familiarity. Of descriptions the rest of the world wasn’t privy to.

The moment he had told Harry of it, it had settled like a certainty.

Riddle lived eerily close to his own new home.

But more importantly, the diary would be there.

Harry knew the position of one horcrux, resting obtrusively on Riddle’s finger, and could probably locate the other soon.

It would be a different matter, separating them from Riddle, and another altogether to find a feasible method to destroy them. But that would come later, once he had stripped Riddle clean of his secrets, tied every obscure fact to his own knowledge of the future.

There was nothing in the way of a _plan_ as Harry could call it. Sketchy images, at best, but they would be enough.

Planning was such a Slytherin thing to do, anyway.


	6. Resurrection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this update has been slow (again), but better late than never, right? Future chapters might be even slower coming. Life has not been kind.

On the shelf above his head, a silver-embossed title – _Esoteric Conversations on the Human Soul_. On the one by his shoulder, curling script on a sweep of lush green – _The Mind Arts_. And a weight on his palms, the scent of old parchment – a tome with a barely legible title.

 _Chronomancy: A Treatise on Time_.

“You’re in a _mood_.”

Harry whipped away from the shelves, book clutched tight in his hands. Nerissa’s voice had emanated from the gloom of the long corridor at the back of the shop.

Even after the week spent sifting, assembling and clearing the piles of tomes, watching furniture and floorboards resurface even as shelves sagged and disappeared, half the shop was still littered with books. Arranged in order, easy to fetch, true, but still forming walls and hillocks on the floor.

Harry thought he rather liked it that way.

“What do you mean, a mood?” He hadn’t been acting oddly, had he? He might have shown up a touch too early to work today, but that couldn’t be remarkable on its own.

Even if he had been late to work every day since he met her.

Nerissa’s head popped out from behind the corridor, her hair swinging clean out of her half-hearted stub of a ponytail. Her brow was furrowed, eyes squinted to the point of exaggeration. “You’re showing too much interest in the books here, for once.”

Harry almost dropped the fraying copy of _Chronomancy_. “I –” he spluttered. “This is a _bookstore_. I _work_ here.”

“I noticed,” Nerissa drawled, her gaze darting down to the book in his hands. “You’re ruining my merchandise. That book needs to be resurrected before you hold it like that.”

Harry blinked and loosened his grip on the crumbling pages, his fingers shifting tentatively. “Resurrected? What, like magic?”

“‘ _Like magic_.’” Nerissa snorted. She plucked her loose hairband off her shoulder and flung it away at a sloppy pile of books. “The muggles do it better. Bring the book and follow me – I’m about to show you my workshop.”

A chill respite from summer greeted him as Harry slipped from the sunlit shopfront to the darkened recesses of the backrooms. At the end of the long corridor, the strange pyramid of marbled books stood like a hulking mass, and hidden just behind it would be the nondescript door Harry had yet to force open.

He half-expected Nerissa to finally reveal what lay beyond it, but she didn’t.

Her silhouette stopped halfway down the corridor, in front of a shelf laden with books, and Harry blinked a few times against the darkness as she prised her nails into the edge of the shelving. It fell open under the force of her hand, swinging on concealed, honeyed hinges.

If the corridor had been dark, the room in front of them was a void that devoured light, darkness spilling tangibly to grasp at their shadows. The shape of Harry’s hand was indiscernible as he instinctively held up his wand and cast a silent _lumos_.

“How many hidden rooms does your shop need, exactly?”

“The shelf opposite this one hides my room.” Nerissa’s words skipped and rolled in a teasing manner, and he could just make out the wink she shot him over her shoulder.

“Wonderful.” His eyes flickered once more to the brick wall of books, shrouded at the end of the corridor.

Maybe next week, he would finally try it. If he survived the coming Saturday.

For a moment, Harry’s breath stuttered.

The back of Nerissa’s head gleamed straw-like and ashy under the _lumos_. The scratch of parchment between his fingertips was brittle as bark.

A heaviness clogged his throat at the thought of _Saturday_ , at the thought of _dinner_ , at the thought of keeping his promise to Riddle, and if he drifted past Saturday, he stumbled upon last night, upon the thought of an empty flat and of seeing Riddle, once, twice and willingly, a third time…

The days before him and the nights behind him were tainted. With the same flavour of bitter, of cold.

Only the present moment – devoid of thought and sight and sound – could ground his frozen hands, steady the breath in his lungs.

It wasn’t until light flared to life upon him, that he realized Nerissa had already ducked into her workshop.

“The book goes on that big table over there,” she called, as Harry stepped over the threshold and waved the _lumos_ away. “You can explore the workshop while I do my _magic_.”

Nerissa’s workshop was… too loud and too quiet, all at once.

At first, there was colour. Explosions of it lured Harry’s eye like schools of fish darting under the glassy surface of a lake. The vibrant jackets of books, the haphazard rolls of thread, the bolts of fabric and smears of paint. On one side, a filing cabinet, teal and clinical, and on the other, clumps of silk and leather and satin and velvet, in rich blues and aubergines and burgundies.

As the obscurity of the hidden little room dispelled, the contraptions came into view. Wooden boards and clamps and screws and – a _microscope_ , of all things – adorned every flat surface, tucked away in corners or upon the rows of worktables.

The lamps threw gold-lined shadows upon the walls. The whites and greys of the countertops shone stark against their lambent glow.

It was impossible to miss the strange clash of magic and muggle in this little space. Muggle machinery layered over a history of witchcraft and wizardry.

Someone had to have owned this shop before Nerissa, right? Someone who must have spelled the flames within those lamps from posing a danger to the ancient books strewn upon the shelves and worktables. Someone who had spelled the air to its clean, almost sterile crispness – that soft undercurrent of metal underneath old parchment. Someone who had used a wand in place of those presses and drills.

Someone who had left this strange little shop in Knockturn Alley to Nerissa.

“Nerissa,” he began, the question edging its way to the tip of his tongue, and there it paused. As though frozen, icicle-like, one slip away from slicing off his tongue altogether.

“Nerissa,” he tried again, but the words melted away. He swallowed them down, and tasted the saltwater of them – perhaps he would ask her next week– “Nerissa, this is messier than the front of the shop.”

From where she had been crouched in front of an open trunk, Nerissa straightened. “Now that’s just a lie,” she said flatly, an eyebrow raised.

An easy smile slipped onto Harry’s lips as she crossed her arms and strutted to her worktable, something clutched in her fist that he couldn’t quite make out. Yes, he could ask next week. He was used to waiting for answers, to slowly drowning in that damnable curiosity.

Harry walked to the table in the centre of the workshop with a cautious tread, as though a wrong move would send the spines of the damaged books cracking open, threads unspooling upon the floor, carefully-stacked paint bottles toppling upon themselves. Metal gleamed at him as he placed the tattered copy of _Chronomancy_ down upon it.

“You won’t learn restoration in a day, if at all,” Nerissa told him with a confident nod. “So you can handle sales for now, and help me out in here if I need it.”

“And you told me you didn’t need a sales clerk.” Harry shook his head and let out an exaggerated sigh.

Nerissa’s arm shot out to press flat against the cover of _Chronomancy_ and drag it closer. She flapped a hand to shoo him away, and Harry had taken several steps back before he took note of the curved blade she had in her grasp.

“Ah,” he breathed as Nerissa unceremoniously stabbed the tip of the blade into the spine of the book. “I’ll… leave you to it then.”

His feet wandered to the silver-grey worktables along the walls – the ones burdened most heavily with books, open-faced and imploring him with illegible blocks of text. Loosened cardboard sheaves, threads so thin they were almost transparent, and pages so fragile he was afraid to look at them too long.

His gaze fell upon an inky sketch of familiar curves and corners. A hand-drawn acromantula, with beady eyes and pincers, and the silky strings of its intricate web…

He caught his hand just as it reached the edge of the frail book. “Am I allowed to touch them?”

In the periphery of his vision was the blurry shape of Nerissa, leaning to peek at the books open before him. “Well… sure. Just make sure they don’t crumble.”

The scritch of her knife against leather was loud in his ears as Harry clasped the cover of the book between two fingers and turned it gently to glance at the title.

There was none. A glossy hardcover of maroon, like old, dried blood, stared blankly back at him.

Harry huffed. “I’m assuming this has something to do with magical creatures?”

“Well, I don’t know, Harry.” The scritch-scratch of Nerissa’s blade didn’t halt. “Do you know how many books on magical creatures I have in my store?”

That was not helpful. Pursing his lips, Harry slipped out his wand and, with delicate sweeps, as though the motion of his wrist would soften the surge of his magic, he pointed it at the pages of the book.

It _was_ on magical creatures. Every spare inch of page scrawled with notes and sketches, brimming with vivid variety, from every corner of the world.

_The magnificent, scarlet bird known as the Phoenix, is an immortal creature. It is associated with the resurrective, transformative properties of the element of fire…_

_Native to East Africa, the Nundu is a gigantic, deadly magical beast considered by many to be the most dangerous creature alive…_

_The Olgoi-Khorkhoi is a snake-like creature roaming beneath the sands of the Gobi Desert, known for its potent venom, which is instantaneously lethal to the touch…_

_The Nure-onna, or Snake Woman, is a reptilian yōkai of Japan, who feasts on human flesh…_

The pages fluttered methodically under his wand, grotesque faces and scaly features jumping out at Harry. Almost as rapid, his eyes flitted from one to the next, scouring, skimming, seeking.

He halted the spell upon a page nearing the end. The elegant scrawl atop unfurled mesmerizingly before him.

_Found primarily in Europe and North Africa, the basilisk is a colossal serpent, who uses both its stare and its venom to kill its victims._

The letters on the page blazed as he read. Unforgettable etchings, alongside the strikingly detailed image on the page, so realistic in its rendition Harry felt sure he would be petrified in the moments he spent gazing upon it.

He drew in a shaky breath as he swept across the long rows of handwritten words. The room faded to a muted blur around him, and the smell of books and the sounds of Nerissa puttering about the worktable merged into banality.

_Fatal flaw is the crowing of the rooster… Its birth is a consequence of the hatching of a chicken egg beneath a toad… First bred by Herpo the Foul… Spiders have a mortal fear…_

Harry sighed. The clench of his teeth was almost painful as he reached the end of the page. Flipping it only revealed a useless illustration of a Rougarou.

The spell cancelled as he put his wand away, the pages flapping back to the entry on acromantulas.

What had he expected? A step-by-step guide on harvesting basilisk venom? A map to the location of the nearest sighting? A way to enter the Chamber of Secrets from outside Hogwarts?

Instead, all he had were reminders. Reminders of a fang in his arm, a ghost of a girl, a crumpled page, Hermione’s cold fist–

Riddle, with Harry’s wand in his hands.

Riddle, with Harry’s wand aimed at his heart.

Riddle, and the empty, empty chill of his voice.

Harry stepped away from the book.

“These are _all_ crumbling,” he mumbled, and it was true.

Some books were missing their covers; some were missing entire pages. A few were wrinkled or torn at the edges, others looked as though they had been eaten through – bitten in the hearts, holes in their souls.

He glanced to where Nerissa was pulling away the pages of _Chronomancy_ from their binding, smithereens of leather strewn about her. Her blade caught the light as she tore into the last of the threads.

The book came apart in her hands.

A little bit of death for a little bit of resurrection.

Just this morning, that book had been whole. _Crumbling_ , yes, but not quite. He could have ignored the faded gilt of its title, the tattiness of its spine, even the water stains upon its ink. But from the moment he had picked up the book from its shelf, he couldn’t have ignored its implications.

_Chronomancy: A Treatise on Time._

What did he know about time? What was that book waiting to tell him?

Even in the future, there were no proven theories on time travel.

Every creak he elicited, every footstep he took, was another ripple which shook the house of cards that was his future. How many changes had he aggravated from the moment he fell onto the floor of Borgin and Burkes? Since he threw open the door to Nerissa’s shop, since he walked with Riddle under the stars?

Harry was not a seer. He couldn’t divine what remained of the future ever since his existence had adulterated the past.

There was no clarity to be gained from mornings. In the daylight, nothing appeared certain. 

“This won’t be ready until next week.”

There was no scritch of a blade anymore. Only the gentle lapping of water, and Nerissa’s voice.

“If you were hoping to buy it,” she continued, the hint of a smirk curling around her words, “you’ll have to wait a bit.”

She had lain the pages out in water, creaseless and spread in a steel tub. There was something about that yellowed, flimsy paper in water, the smooth translucency of the pages, swishing like gossamer and gauze, that made Harry draw closer on hushed feet.

“Careful,” Nerissa murmured. “It can be quite hot to the touch.”

The warning only made Harry's fingers itch to test the temperatures for himself. “Where did you learn all this?”

“America.” Nerissa didn’t look up from the watery papers, her fingers indelicate as she scraped off thick coats of amber adhesives. Her answer was easy and off-handed, and yet it settled like a brick upon a wall.

There was no trace of gentleness in her hands as she worked. It was a marvel the paper hadn’t disintegrated into pulp in the water.

Harry glanced at the trunks lined one upon the other in a corner, overflowing with leather and butter-soft tissue, and then back at Nerissa. At the tenseness of her shoulders as she bent closer to the metal tub, peeling the pages out of the water. Her choppy hair fell forward to hide her face.

“So,” began Harry, his voice too loud to his own ears, “would I get an employee discount?”

“Not a chance,” Nerissa said dryly. Harry could tell her smirk was back without looking.

He pushed his glasses up his nose, widening his gaze and arching an eyebrow. “Why not? I think I’ve been a model employee, Nerissa.”

She rolled her eyes as she stepped back from the tub. “I’ll gift it to you for your birthday. Happy?”

“You don’t know when my birthday is,” Harry grumbled. _He_ didn’t even know when his birthday would fall in this timeline. “I’d rather have it next week – or I could just read it in the shop. It’s not like there’s work all the time.”

“And you call yourself a model employee.” Nerissa wiped her hands on a towel and tossed it at the crumbling books. It smacked against the wall and missed the table by inches.

The lamps died into nothingness the moment Harry ducked out of the room after Nerissa. Spots of green and ocean-blue hazed across his vision as the light vanished into chilling darkness before burning radiant once more as they stepped into the shopfront.

Climbing onto the stool behind the counter, Harry pressed his palm flat in the path of a shaft of sunlight. It danced gold upon his skin, warmed his blood like a hand holding his own.

Nerissa was speaking, but the words reached him a beat after the movement of her mouth.

“Why do you need it so much, anyway?”

 _To find a way home. To know if there_ is _a home._

“Academic interest.”

Gathering a pile of books in her arms, Nerissa shot him a sceptical glare.

“What about cursed artefacts?” asked Harry, before she could say anything. “Do you have any books about those, in the meanwhile…? Like, I don’t know, cursed candles?”

Nerissa’s eyes narrowed to a comical squint. “Have you come across many cursed candles of late?”

“Not even one,” Harry lied.

“Oh, I suppose you just like to be suspiciously specific in your ‘academic interests,’ then.” Nerissa huffed as she kicked out a carton from behind a settee and dumped her armful of books into it. “I know nothing about candles, but there might be about seventy books on cursed artefacts. Maybe ten on candle-making, even. Plenty to entertain you?”

Harry slumped against the countertop, his shoulders deflating. “Oh, that… That might take a few years to comb through.”

Nerissa kicked the carton again. Her silhouette had disappeared behind a tower of books before her grousing voice called to him.

“Oh, shut up.” The sound of hardcovers toppling to the floor. “Fine, you can take them home.”

Harry straightened against the counter. “Are you sure?”

“One at a time!” Nerissa strolled out from behind the tower, her lost hairband twined into her fingers. She sighed as she met Harry’s eyes. “Hopefully, they won’t be missed.”

In the next moment, Harry was on his feet, stumbling back to the shelf in the corner, the shelf in the shadows where he had spotted–

_Esoteric Conversations About the Human Soul._

_The Mind Arts._

“Nerissa…” Harry paused to look back at her. “What do you know about Tanglewood?” 

Nerissa shrugged and threw up her hands. “What am I, your personal library? Why'd you want to know about Tanglewood?”

“I'm invited to some boring, stuffy _thing_ there.” The more Harry spoke of it, the faster the words tumbled out, matching the rapid beat of his heart. “I'd like to know what I'm getting into.”

In an instant, Nerissa’s complaints melted into a guffaw.

With a hunch of his shoulders, Harry swivelled back to look at the shelves. His face flushed with heat, and the embossed titles of the books blurred into a miasma of silver and green.

“It's just something Riddle wants me to go to,” he mumbled. It was a ridiculous reason to dangle his hand over the jaws of vipers, an outrageous reason to risk an entire timeline.

“Riddle being that berk from Borgin and Burkes. Oh, Borgin and _Berks_.” Another loud guffaw had Harry rolling his eyes. “Did you see what I did there?” 

“Yes, you're a comedic genius. Can you answer me now, please?” 

“I don't know, Harry.” Nerissa slammed a heavy tome onto a table, and Harry winced and turned to her on instinct. “I don't like this Riddle you keep chasing after.”

Harry fought off the urge to cross his arms across his chest, to shrink into himself even further. “I– _What?_ I'm not chasing after him! You sent me to sell him that book, remember? And _he_ invited _me_.”

“And you agreed. Even though I'm pretty sure we both agree he's a berk.” The corner of Nerissa’s mouth twisted into a grimace. “Your funeral. This your first high-class party, then?”

A sigh slipped out of Harry's lips and he sagged helplessly against the shelves. “More or less. Where the hell is Tanglewood, anyway?”

“Somewhere near Oxfordshire.” Nerissa flapped a dismissive hand. “The Blacks own it – it's one of their more well-known properties. God knows they have a thousand others whose names, I'm sure, even the heirs don't know.”

Harry hummed, listless, and pressed his forehead against the enamelled wood of the shelf. “I know nothing about anything, do I?”

“Nah, you're like a lost little duckling.”

“Nerissa.” Raising his head, Harry thumbed at the embossed titles of the books before him. “You know a lot about this pureblood stuff, don't you?”

“'Bout as much as you'd know if you lived as one for eleven years.”

And just like that, the lingering curiosity crawled back, begging to push and prod and pry.

It was only his second week knowing Nerissa, and there was too much barraging his tongue each day; questions – _what was your family like? Why did they leave this shop to you? Where were you before you reopened it?_ – and comfort – _I know the peace in working with your hands. I know how the things we shape with our hands feel closer than the things we shape with magic –_ and yet he held them back. They were, after all, just one of the many things he couldn’t know, just one of the many things he couldn’t tell. A chasm of absences, a void of wordlessness, a pit of isolation.

Of all the times and places in existence, 1950 wasn’t supposed to be familiar to him. Not the way Ron had been on the Hogwarts Express, offering his life up with his corned beef sandwiches.

Or perhaps this was just what growing older was supposed to be. Silence and distance and the choice not to interrupt it.

"How do I…" he began instead, trailing off before shaking his head. "What do I need to do, in order to not look like a complete idiot?" 

_Who cares?_ A biting voice whispered to him, emanating from the graveyard of his thoughts. _It's just Voldemort and his Death Eaters._

Harry raised a hand to the books once more, just in time to hide a grin into his arm. "Never mind," he said, giving in to the voice almost immediately. 

He could feel Nerissa’s dark eyes on him. Gleaming in sympathy, maybe, or would it be pity? "Just don't wear muggle clothes, and you should be fine."

“Great,” Harry whispered to the books. “As if furniture shopping wasn’t enough, I have to get new robes, too, now.”

Squib though she might be, Nerissa’s hearing had to be magical, for her question came whip-like and instantaneous. “Furniture shopping? You found a new home then?”

“Just a flat,” said Harry vaguely, catching his lip between his teeth, wringing it until a rush of pain swarmed him like a bonfire. “I’m still moving.”

His hand hovered between the spines of the two tomes. Soul magic and Occlumency.

Which of the two did he need the most?

Occlumency had been a compulsory part of auror training, a subject each recruit must excel in, to make it to the ranks. But the holes in Harry’s grasp on the Mind Arts weren’t merely about lack of training.

 _Clear your mind_ , Snape had enunciated, over and over, in vain. _Find the boundary between the self and the world_ , the decrepit old instructor at the auror academy had intoned to a class of fifty-five, which had dwindled to thirty-six at the end of two years.

Harry, it turned out, couldn’t fathom how to do either. And the final number of recruits might have been thirty-five if Kingsley hadn’t stepped in – _“You can’t possibly quit the aurors before you’ve even started, Harry,”_ – and assigned him a specialized instructor. A witch by the name of Martha Windermere. 

Windermere had thrown all his Occlumency training out the window, the first time she met him.

 _“Not all minds have rigid boundaries_ ,” she had told him as she nursed a cup of jasmine tea between her palms. _“To clear your mind means to imagine it as a void where you pour your self – but for some, the mind is nothing_ but _the self_. _How do you clear that, which is not a space but an entity?”_

Five years had passed since he tried Occlumency for the first time, and Harry could safely say he was no better at it than he had been at fifteen. Some semblance of shields fortified his mind against Legilimency, yes, but they were weak, mere afterthoughts.

The defence that Windermere had drilled into him wasn’t a traditional technique of the Mind Arts. It was a variant, a warp of the rules, one that she tailored to him, one that he reluctantly accepted upon Kingsley’s insistence. It was potent, yet Harry was loath to use it as anything except a last resort.

But Riddle was too great a danger to a mind as unprotected, as un-Occluded as Harry’s. The previous night had proven it.

To be around a Legilimens with a damning curiosity – a death sentence would be kinder.

“Don’t worry about Tanglewood,” said Harry through the bite of his lip, and he didn’t know if he was speaking to Nerissa or himself as his hand closed around the spine of _The Mind Arts_. “This is the last meeting. I won’t seek Riddle out after this, and I’ll make sure he doesn’t… he doesn’t look for me again.”

He carried the leather-bound title to the counter, placing it where his hand had rested, in the shaft of late morning sunlight. Nerissa’s answering hum came a second too late.

“I think it’s much more fun to never leave your house at all, Harry.”

Her eyes, when Harry glanced up at her, were affixed to the book he had carried down from the shelves, to the title on the cover. There was a furrow in her brow, a purse to her downturned mouth.

“I – I know exactly what I’m doing.” Harry scratched a finger upon the leather cover just as the coppery taste of blood dripped onto his tongue.

His teeth had almost bitten clean through his lip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harry has only one setting and it is _"sus"_.

**Author's Note:**

> Let me know what you think in the comments!
> 
> This work is a repost. To old readers: I'm sorry for the sudden disappearance of this fic. The major divergences in the new version start happening around chapter 4.
> 
> To new readers: I hope you enjoy.
> 
> I still have a [tumblr](https://audair.tumblr.com/). Feel free to drop by, share your thoughts!


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